Quandoo

Challenges

The restaurant business is a complicated thing. Its success depends on a lot of variables such as population, location, menu, prices, working hours, rental, etc. A good manager should have a way to optimize at least some of the parameters relying on the stats. But how do you gather statistics not ruining restaurant’s established working rhythm?

A German-based company Quandoo has created a platform for gathering all the necessary statistics for any restaurant. The task that they gave us as to the mobile application development company, was to create an app for the restaurant owners and administrators on that same platform. We were quite happy to accept the challenge. In the beginning, we had to create a handy and helpful application with a minimum viable set of functions (MVP). It had to provide users with a suitable interface packed with various instruments to observe and gather the stats on particular reservations and overall attendance at their restaurants.

The parameters that should have been tracked for any reservation were: reservation date, time, number of seats and tables occupied, guest’s contact info, preferred meal etc. Also, the application should also be able to show detailed stats on the number of customers, booked tables, guests’ dining history and preferences. Everything with the timestamps, of course. Also, there should be additional features like language recognition, communication with clients, regulars database, alternative suggestion and ability to send some pretty little things like gift cards, vouchers and special offers to fill empty tables during off-peak times.

Solution

Development

Together with Quandoo team, our software developing company decided to create a native application for iOS platform, as it offered better stability and performance than a cross-platform solution. The logic of the app was separated: one part was responsible for all the things server, and the other one was dedicated to front-end or interface. Server side was built on a platform belonging to Quandoo company, which we have modified for the needs of the application. All front-end was created from the ground-up.

Design

Besides the development, we also worked with the UI/UX part of the project. Our team thrived to create the design that can be utilized easily by both new and existing users of Quandoo solutions. We also ensured the compliance with style guidelines and general principles of the brand.

At the initial stage, we created an interactive prototype, that was tested by our team first and then passed to the beta users. The results of this testing helped us to move in the right direction and achieve clean and intuitive interface design with the traditional accents of Quandoo.

The main purpose of our work was to help clients interact with the Quandoo platform fast and efficiently both on the front-end and on the insides. The complexity of the project had been growing with each additional feature. But we had several solutions for each problem, giving the ability to choose the most appropriate out of all. In order to achieve desired results, we used powerful libraries like Alamofire, SwiftyJSON, JTAppleCalendar and many others.