Appetini Custom — Designed Meal Delivery Solution

The situation

Trying to catch up with the ever-shifting lunch delivery services, our founder Rodion Salnik suggested an idea to develop a feature-rich food ordering app that was later adopted by the entire team. In 2016, it was the right call for us since most of the big players haven't entered the Sumy market yet. That's why we wanted to come into play and build a product for our town.

It was a food delivery startup project that we prepared inspired by the accelerators we had taken part in beforehand. Speaking of which, you might want to consider the mistakes that we made while building Appetini and find some helpful hints in our latest article How to Not Fail Your Food Delivery Startup: Crucial Factors to Consider.

Backed by our previous expertise in the Foodtech development , the decision was made to evaluate the risks and consult with the industry-specific experts. As a result of our in-depth research, we managed to find a bunch of firms and restaurants that were providing food delivery services. Nevertheless, there were a few more details for us to keep in mind:

• High cost of meals to order every day
• Restaurant menu — a lot of people wanted homemade lunches
• Many home cooks were ready to deliver their food
• Competitors' websites looked bad and outdated
• Many meals had no pictures making it harder to know what you are ordering
• Most of the time, users who use food delivery services are busy or hungry, so they need instant-gratification

Working process

The first step in our to-do list was a fully-functioning MVP development that allowed us to test the project's viability. Recently we published article about our preparatory measures for the MVP stage of food delivery startup.

To end up with a smoothly working MVP designed to showcase Rodion's idea, we started with the requirements elicitation. A simple website that we could use as a landing page to order a lunch delivery from certain cooks was all we ever needed at this phase. So the first version was done in just 3 days.

Basically, the interface was comprised of two key functionality elements:

• Available lunch display
• Lunch order

Prototyping

After a successful MVP launch, we decided to develop the next version of the product.

Our primary goal here was to think over all the crucial details, so we started our work by prototyping the idea. The tool we used for prototyping was Mockingbird. At the first go-of, we came up with a basic set of features for both web and mobile versions, since such an approach is a common practice for similar projects.

Here are some of the key features and components the project had at the initial stage, including 4 types of users.

All the functionality was based on user stories, which were split into tasks right after. We used Trello to effectively track tasks and manage our workflow.

Our team

To exceed the client’s expectations, we assembled a proactive team of on-site seasoned professionals with years of software development experience. Our specialists examined the ins and outs of the current business issue to let people stay on top of their mental health.

They demonstrated their ability to meet tight deadlines while responding to the ever-changing business requirements without sacrificing the product quality. The team was comprised of:

Our Services

• Product development
• MVP development
• Web app development
• DevOps and Cloud Services

Technology

Design

On top of everything else, the major challenge was to develop a fully-fledged food delivery platform anchored by an eye-pleasing design and a user-friendly interface. It means we had to ensure all the elements were intuitive enough so that every user could clearly understand where to look or how to make an order. Eventually, we ended up with a few design patterns to apply. The tool we used for designing was Figma.

Once the designs and prototypes were completed, we moved on to the development stage.

Functionality expanding

To meet the ever-growing market requirements and satisfy our own needs, the team decided to implement additional functionality enhancements.

Ordering lunches from different cooks. Previously, it was possible to order food delivery from only one cookery expert at a time. That said, we added the possibility to combine different cooks in one group so that a courier could visit each cook and take an order to the address Making group orders. We added the possibility to share the cart's link with every teammate so that the entire office could order food delivery from a single account in one payment Multiple lunch creation by templates Purchasing multiple deliveries at once to save money

This time around, we opted for the iterative development methodology to allow for easier testing and debugging, as well as to enable the seamless introduction of functionality changes along the way. Based on this model, each iterative change passed through the following steps:

• User stories
• Task decomposition
• Prototype drawing
• Additional design
• Development
• Testing

Business Challenges

During the project development, we had to think over the functionality of saving orders in a cookie file that can later be shared with others. In such a case, if someone opened the link from another device, he would see the order that had already been formed and could add his own lunch to the list. Our developers faced a few pitfalls to work on, but their combined efforts resulted in an appropriate workaround.

Delivered Solution

Our platform leverages a modern, future-proof tech stack and features all the required tools to quickly browse the restaurant's menu and order lunch with just a few clicks.

With Appetini, you can:

Additionally, the resulting solution comprises three user types, each with its own functionality features.