Inspiration
My teammate and I both have work experience in restaurants as a server. With the customers always looking around to find a server and servers getting stressed out at peak time walking the same route back and forth just to get a single fork, we found the current way of customer-server communication has been inefficient and prone to error. To improve the restaurant's service performance and social presence, and to boost the customer experience at the same time, we decided to design a webpage that can send specific requests to waiters as customers and receive real-time interactions from customers as waiters. We aim to facilitate an effective and more agreeable way of communication between restaurant staff and patrons, and to soothe the haste of fast-paced social interactions to build closer bonds between people.
What it does
The customer's website would be activated after scanning the table-specific QR code and several quick tabs would show up such as "water", "to-go box", "pay in-person" etc. The customer can then click one of them or customize in the "+" and input the number of items and other details of the request. Once a request is sent, screens on the waiters' devices will all be updated and they can see whether there is someone who has picked up and taken care of the request. There will also be a space for meme interactions or short message communications for every past request to let the people give warm feedback to each other.
How we built it
In the coding aspect, we tried to use React/html/css to carry out the website syncing process between the sender and receiver's websites. Our conception is that the domain would contain two separate children, one is for the senders (customers) and another one is for the receivers (waiters). Requests are sent to the internet server and the receiver's website livestreams the new requests or checks the server's state every other time to update itself periodically. For the graphics, we used Figma to showcase the features of the website.
Challenges we ran into
The 2/2 people on our team are both first-time hackers and also not familiar with front-end and design. We picked this idea merely out of our passion and identification with the issue. We got stuck in implementing the communication between websites by coding but finally succeeded, and had little clue about how to improve the aesthetic of the website using only front-end languages.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are building a new way of social connections and service delivery by creating this website tool, and are also embarking on eliminating the social distance and cracks of communication between the providers and receivers of social services.
What we learned
We learned the basic use of Google Firebase in the live-streaming process and the use of a hosting service from AWS to actualize the HTML on a real webpage.
What's next for ServEase
The simple tool of real-time request communications between devices can really be applied to many social services industries, such as healthcare, airline services, and more. The website can be iterated by adding more features that cater to each kind of service and be developed into different modes and versions under the selection of social service providers.
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