Sparrow
— providing restaurant feedback from real people, in real time
Project Overview
Sparrow Real Time is a community crowd-sourced mobile application providing real time updates, reviews and feedback on user’s favorite restaurants and bars.
Garnering about $500K in initial investment for development alone, Sparrow was a challenging project to say the least. Dealing with multiple changeovers in management, development teams and working through a pandemic.
Despite those challenges, we launched an MVP in 2021. Find Sparrow in the App Store or learn about it online.
Role: Project Managing Assistant — also taking on various roles in UX & content
Duration: Jul 2020 - Dec 2022
Tools: Jira / Figma
— About Sparrow
Sparrow was initially developed to be a community based platform that allowed users to provide crowd-sourced, real time updates on crowdedness, in addition to using an interactive heat map to display activity in areas around you. However with the pandemic in full wake, Sparrow’s mission changed course a bit to include safety reviews and up to date restaurant regulations, adding on a safety meter and ratings. The goal being to put the information in the hands of users quickly and efficiently.
Brought on to assist with user experience, my role morphed into project managing as there was no UX team. This broadened my perspective of the project development process as I worked on cross-functionally on ideation, content, development, QA and PR/marketing. Although there is still lots to do, this project was put on pause by the founder, with the potential to restart in the future.
— My Contributions
Audience Segments and Persona Development
Gamification Development
In-app Pop-ups
Sparrow Website - Content
Metadata and Keywords
— Audience Segments
Brought on midway to consult with design and user experience of Sparrow prototype, my first task was to develop the audience segments and personas based on the 4 target audiences explained to me by the Project Manager. By talking with various individuals, I gained insights into who these users might be. These were used for design development and PR/marketing.
— Gamification Development
I then worked closely with the Project Managers and the development team to ideate and build out the gamification feature. Here we decided to use a points system to encourage user interactions. At this phase, gamification was still being developed and was not implemented into the app yet.
6 Ranks were created to be fun, gender neutral and reflect leveling up — New Sparrow, Sparrow Warrior, Sparrow Adventurer, Noble Sparrow, Royal Sparrow and a secret rank, Imperial Sparrow.
Ranking System
Points were gained by completing your profile, checking into locations, leaving reviews, referring friends, rating reviews, adding photos of a location, etc.
Points System
User's needed a way to view their ranking and points. With the team, we created various screen designs of potential displays of Sparrow Rank making sure to at least highlight current rank, current number of points and points needed to get to the next level.
Display Features
From brainstorming and various suggestions by the founder, the future of Sparrow’s gamification would include earnable badges, leaderboards and digital goods as rewards.
Future Implementations
— In-app Popups
Next, I helped oversee the development of in-app pop-up notifications — defining the purpose, content, location, triggers, frequency, conditions and clickable links of each. After my pop-ups were approved, they were sent to the development team to implement into the prototype.
Random pop-ups occur at any given time, they are not timed to go off based on a particular user action. I identified 4 random pop-ups:
Random Pop-ups
Finish setting up user profile
01
Update user’s preferences
02
Sparrow rating other user review
03
Invite/refer a friend to Sparrow
04
Triggered pop-ups occurs when a specific event or condition is met based on the user’s actions within the app. These next 5 pop-up every time the condition is met.
Triggered Pop-ups
05
Added by another user
Encourage user to continue to gain more points to level up their Sparrow Rank
06
Leveled up in their Sparrow Rank
07
Leave a review / safety review
08
Leave a review with a photo
09
— Sparrow Website
Working with the development team, I aided in the Sparrow website content and overall design, keeping it simple and concise, yet highlight what makes Sparrow unique as a digital product. Take a look on www.sparrowrealtime.com
— Metadata & Keywords
Another one of my main contributions was gathering metadata and coming up with a list of keywords to be integrated into the Discover tab of Sparrow, where Cuisine and Occasions browsing features are located. This included searching, filtering, preferences, and results features.
For this, I pulled a list of food cuisines and categories used under these Discover tabs based on the most common searched food types or occasions to get food or drinks.
Starting with our test cities — Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Toronto & Dubai — I compiled a list of various restaurants to add to the initial Sparrow database to fill up the categories for our initial launch. My data was inputted by the dev team and can be found within the various cuisine and occasion categories.
— Reflection
Changeovers in management, development teams and Covid created a lot of pauses and setbacks at various stages of the project.
The lack of a UX team made it challenging for me to champion implementing UX within various stages, I took it upon myself to suggest alterations based on UX practices and even did some guerrilla testing with the prototype on users to get feedback.
Challenges
Actual user testing — conducting formal user testing or usability studies would have aided in supporting certain design decisions along.
UX Design team — the maturity of UX was very low within this project, even so that there wasn't even a formal design team.
Improvements
