Restaurant/Cafe Booking Solution

The idea was to enable users to customize their search as per their preferences, whether it is by location, cuisine, meal type and more. The client wanted both the website and the apps to have the kind of user-friendly features that prompted more people to use the website and apps.

The client wanted a website and a mobile application for iOS and Android that enabled users to find and reserve a table at their favorite restaurant easily, quickly and seamlessly. This café/restaurant discovery and booking solution needed to be backed by a large and continuously increasing directory of cafes, restaurants, pubs and bars.

The biggest challenge was that the website and the apps had to compete with other web and mobile apps that were offering similar services. The objective was to offer better features, UI and UX and the next level of user-driven functionality. Some of the key challenges that were overcome were:

• A unified approach to design and development of both website and apps wherein there is a consistency in the functionality and visuals of apps and website.
• The ability to search for restaurants, café, pubs and bars in the user’s City, by location, cuisine, and many more search filters.
• Ability to view menus, pictures, phone numbers, directions, user reviews and all other information a user needs to pick a restaurant that suits their preferences.

• Offer a simple table reservation process that makes it easy to book tables, update reservation, cancel or re-book from any place, at any time.
• Enable users to rate and review restaurants they’ve been to and share photos of their YUMMIEST foodie moments directly from the app.
• Provide map usage to explore restaurants around the user’s location or the user can draw a circle around a specific search area.
• Finding and following friends to see where they’re eating, what they’ve liked, and what they didn’t.
• Ability to see all activities followed by user in their DineLine page.

Technostacks’ team of website designers, developers, iOS app developers and Android app developers made a concerted effort to deliver a website, an iOS app and an Android app that met all client requirements. A thorough requirements gathering and analysis process before actual development began, ensured the whole team was in sync with the final objectives.

Our developers identified PHP as the server scripting language that was best suited to create the dynamic and data intensive website the client wanted. Also, its cross-server compatibility, support for a large number of databases and low maintenance costs were a point in its favor. Our expertise on CodeIgniter PHP Web Framework ensured we could build a full-featured website that offered all the features the client wanted.

For app development we used the latest iOS and a variety of tools available on the Android Studio to create a powerful, feature-rich, iOS and Android app for the client.