Lovely Screens That Never Made It
During my time creating Aroma, I had a lot of really bad ideas and some really dope ideas. Here are few of the features I created that sadly never got to see the light of day.
From left to right
Reviews:
The idea of reviews on the Aroma platform was a long-debated subject. We didn't want to create a space for people to be vindictive or toxic. Understanding that sometimes restaurants and people have bad days it felt unfair to both parties to have the generic five stars and comment review system. The team wanted a way to help restaurants understand how to grow but also not have one incident tank them in the process. Thus the feedback screen was born, a simple compliment/improvement section that could give quality data to restaurants on how to improve. We added a note section and made the reviews completely private. Everyone has different taste and a review shouldn't stop you from giving a place a chance!
Coupons:
We had this vision where a restaurant could use our backend to create a coupon and hit one button to send it out to every user who it would be beneficial for. Coupons would be saved to your profile and never expire. We felt this way of promoting your business could be super effective and be rewarding for a user. We also would make money from this so that's a plus too.
Events
I really loved the idea of restaurants promoting their events on the platform. I can tell you right now, it's a completely bloated idea and that's why we didn't create this feature.
Profile Section
The profile section was going to be a breakout section in how Aroma would handle itself. We wanted to game-ify our restaurant search engine and for good reason. By creating a leveling system we were able to easily explain to restaurants who was a quality lead and who wasn't. High level meant you went out more, had more data you could provide, and could be a good target for a tasty coupon or even gift card. This, in turn, would make users use the app even more to get the juicy rewards. It would be very fun to test these assumptions!
*My Thoughts*
The profile section was the first screen I ever created that made me think so much more about the value I was bringing a user than about the experience I was giving. Experience is great but an app that feels good that doesn't truly provide value is still worthless.