RESEARCH

The idea for Let's Dinner! came to life during a project at the Apple Developer Academy in Naples, Italy. The end-goal of the project was to develop an app that could help protect the environment / help local communities. Our team had a major problem: we couldn’t agree on anything. We struggled to find possible ideas that excited us or that we were passionate about. After several tiresome brainstorming sessions, all we wanted was an easygoing and inexpensive meal that we could share with friends. While casually investigating solutions for our dinner problem, we soon realized that we all share a passion for food - nice!

‍

Sooo, same place as yesterday?

‍

With that in mind, we looked into creating a solution based on our newly found shared passion. While existing solutions have interesting approaches around planning and inviting others to have a meal, we found that we usually default back to flooding existing chats. Our initial research demonstrated common patterns in how users approached similar situations, e.g. that people don’t want to join yet another group chat, be a part of another messaging platform, or download a new app that allows you to send invitations - might as well use the calendar.

‍

We structured our findings into 2 parts:

• Understand how an invitation could be more useful than just time blocked in your calendar
• Is it possible to utilise existing messaging platforms?

Conclusion: create an event rich in detail that could be turned into an interactive/collaborative calendar while taking advantage of Apple’s iMessage technology, as it allows you to stay in chat without adding any clutter to the conversation.

Let's Dinner! was born.

DESIGN

ITERATION

An iMessage app is not a common platform to design for, as it isn’t very popular. During initial testing we learned that the app falls short of an onboarding, which is especially critical for an unpopular platform. There isn’t much documentation available, which makes it difficult to know what users expect, so I followed a Lean Design approach. Additionally, lot of the design process is a result of trial and error, which came with a lot of feedback and ultimately resulted in a still ongoing redesign. We wanted our product to mature before releasing it to the public, so we decided to release a beta on TestFlight for the time being.

You can download and try Let's Dinner! below (you will not be charged while using a TestFlight version of the app, even when asked to pay). Note: Please keep in mind that you need an iPhone or iPad to test the app, as Let’s Dinner! utilises iMessage.

‍

‍