Plans & Progress
To start I will give an overview of what our team plans to accomplish with our project. With ShopMate the team wants to make a fully functional nutritional and kitchen inventory maintenance application, what this entails is many different features and these features include things such as kitchen inventory, shopping lists, smart orders based off the trends of your shopping patterns, a trending recipes function, and an option to provide you with a list of recipes based on what you have in your inventory. We also want to bring some easy ordering options and ways to optimise the user experience through suggestions on what you may need to order based on your previous orders.
The inventory maintenance application is the core feature of our application, and it is going to be the most important part. A fresh user will log into the app for the first time ever and then it will proceed to get you to input your kitchen inventory, whatever you have will be stored into a database and from there is where it is going to adapt to the user. You will be able to use your current inventory to search for a list of recipes from the database that are available to cook and if the recipe you are searching for isn’t available you can add your own or even make tweaks to existing recipes and save them locally to your device. Once a recipe has been cooked you can tick it off and the ingredients used will be removed from your inventory and have an option to add them to the shopping list as well as to rate the recipe to improve suggestions on what can be cooked. The inventory section will have nutritional information on each product, and you will even be able to compare different brands to examine the nutritional information on each brand. On the note of nutritional information once a recipe is cooked it will display the nutritional information of each serve and can be added to a nutrition diary which will track your daily and weekly macro and micronutrient intake. This is the perfect app for the health-conscious individual.
We hope to make the product a cloud based service with the use of SQL databases to store most of our products information for example our recipes would be put in the cloud for ease of storage and then giving the option to load in more ingredients and recipes custom to each user.
The shopping list feature will be built upon what you have cooked and depleted from your inventory as well as a manual add option. We intend to add a feature for perishable items such as fruit and vegetables and milk where the user can put in an expiry date or a preferred range of dates that they want to keep the product for, and it will ping a notification a day prior to the expiration as well as a recipe suggestion for the expiring products. The shopping list feature will have an online order feature integrated where it will export your current shopping list and order it via Coles or Woolworths online with the option for click and collect or home delivery. We also would like to integrate a feature for a speedier delivery option with Door Dash as a delivery partner as opposed to through the store. All products that have been ordered through the shopping list feature will then be added into the inventory so from this point on the system is self sufficient and if used properly you won’t have to manually add items again. After constant use the app will be able to detect trends in your shopping and ping notifications to the user regarding what they may be running low on or what items they may need to order soon and in a way pre-fill your cart before the items actually run out.
The “what to make” section and the “trending recipes” section go hand in hand as they are a similar feature. The trending recipes is just as it says, based on users around the world it will rotate through trending recipes so that the user can draw inspiration from what others are cooking and get ideas for their own meals. The “what to make” function is where the user will be able to select a meal of their choice whether it would be breakfast, lunch, dinner or a snack and based off of what you have in your inventory the app will provide a list of recipes and the recipes will be able to become more personalised over time based off of the user rating the recipes with a thumbs up or thumbs down.
Lastly of the immediate ideas for the foundation of this app we have our “Business+” feature which is designed to bring an ease of ordering and inventory maintenance to restaurants, the way we plan to make this feature work again is to load in an inventory and the restaurants recipes and through the register at the front when an item is ordered off the menu it will deduct the ingredients all the while the app will be sending inventory notes to the suppliers and letting them know what the restaurant is running low on and forecast what items will be sold and in demand. Based off of this information a report can be generated to tell the restaurant manager what items are selling really well and what are underperforming to either be removed from the menu or be marketed better or improved on as well as the possibility of including the popular items in a chef special for example.
At the current stage of our project, we are still in early development where we are designing our user interface as well as a simple program to get a shopping list available. The function of the program will be to retrieve user input and to store it as a list for shopping. As it is still early days of our development, we are still trying to learn new ways to store the information and create the most efficient programs that we can with the intention of constantly updating it as we learn more things and implement more features.
As far as the UI goes, we are exploring options of ways to create the best user experience playing around on adobe XD trying to create a clean user-friendly interface that is a modern design. We have done a few drafts and have decided on one for our apps eventual launch with a swiping design to navigate the app as well as clear labels of what features are in the app.
As we are still new in the IT space one of the “dead-ends” that we have encountered so far is our current knowledge capacity, unfortunately as a team we are all new to the IT space and as much as we want to deliver a clean finished product a heavy limiter that we have encountered is our knowledge. Programming languages at the start of our learning were completely new to us all and as our skills are developing so is our ability to advance our project.
Not so much a dead end on our project but more an overtime development we have had as a team is the usefulness of our business feature as opposed to the pantry feature, unfortunately people are lazy by nature, the idea of inputting all your ingredients into an app seems fine on paper but through trial and error and our own thoughts , the user base that would have the motivation to constantly use the app to fill their inventory into the app may be a rather small audience, having said that it still doesn’t change the overall usefulness or the goals of the team. We believe however that in learning this we could place a larger emphasis on the premium business+ feature.
The business+ feature not only is more convenient for businesses as opposed to the average household as a business must constantly keep track of their inventory, but it also has a much greater marketability. The feature itself creates an ease of ordering for small business’ so it takes the worrying out of trying to maintain your inventory. Not only does it make it easier for the business owner to run their shop it also tells them the important information of key products and can keep track of spikes in seasonal sales.
The project plan is slowly changing to play to the strengths of the app, at the end of the day the key thing about developing an app is to make money off it and we believe that the userbase for our main pantry function wouldn’t be as high demand as our business+ feature so we are beginning to shift our focus over more towards the Business+, our phases of launch still haven’t changed but we are intending to shift over towards the Business+ feature and try to perfect it as much as possible when we progress to that feature.