BRIAN

QUAN

Dine Out 2.0

Food festival alternative search tools

I designed and coded a web-service mashup to provide the public with better restaurant research tools for the Dine Out Vancouver Festival.

During Dine Out Vancouver (DOV), an annual food festival in Metro Vancouver, I was frustrated when choosing a restaurant to go to with friends. I wanted to see which restaurants were near the area where we were meeting and which were the top-rated restaurants to try, but these features were just not available on the official DOV website. I was frustrated and sensed that this was a need that other users would share, so I went ahead and made my own discovery tools.

All restaurants on a map for spatial browsing

The official DOV site only allowed for browsing non-dynamic lists of restaurants by price, cuisine, or general neighbourhood.

I enhanced the wayfinding experience by placing all the restaurants on a map so the information could be browsed spatially, allowing foodies to pick a restaurant near them or a destination that they will be in. The map allows for selecting restaurants near a specific geographic area. Foodies can now plan their DOV foodie crawl on a map or visually choose a Tapas bistro near their boyfriend's place.

With over 250+ restaurants, I also wanted to know which ones were good. I cross referenced the restaurants with their Yelp scores and placed all the data in a dynamically sortable table, so people can filter the restaurants by rankings, reviews, or other categories like neighbourhood and city. By cross referencing with Yelp scores and reviews, we now know Gelato is the best thing to get during Dine Out!

Column sortable and filterable list of all restaurants with Yelp reviews

The first Dine Out 2.0 was created in 2014 and every subsequent year since I have created a new version of the tool. (The official Dine Out Vancouver is still using the same website and has yet to update)

2014:

  • Received about 500 views (only shared to friends)
  • 2015:

  • Received about 5300 views in 2 weeks
  • Vancouver Sun ran an article on it
  • Featured on Reddit Vancouver
  • Several dozen thank you emails from Vancouverites
  • Involved Skills:

    User Experience, Data Analysis & Wrangling, Front-End Development (with jQuery, Web APIs, CSS)

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