Inspiration
Have you ever been in a new city, sifting through thousands of highly-rated restaurants?
How do you know the difference between an overhyped tourist trap over a high-quality local treasure?
Little Gems provides a way to find the "iykyk" spots among locals that fit your dietary needs and preferences. Culinary tourism is a fast-growing billion-dollar industry. With over 195 million solo travellers each year, tourists are constantly searching for unique dining experiences that are not only highly rated but also authentic and immersive in local communities.
By connecting locals with tourists through a time-flexible matching/pairing system, visitors can eat like locals, with locals, for a flat fee of $5. Through this convenient and transparent transaction, locals can share their knowledge of their community to provide flavourful recommendations and dish out their favourite spots alongside curious tourists.
Solution
The entire frontend uses React Native and the backend is fully powered by Convex. The real-time databases and web-socket connections from Convex allowed real-time messaging and lag-free synchronization between frontend and backend.
Applying Design Features
Challenges we ran into
Authentication: was a big pain in the beginning. Thankfully Convex's authentication features with Clerk helped make things go much smoother.
Accessibility: Another big hurdle we had was making the app more accessible and available on both iOS and Android. This required extensive user testing and research as well as meticulous UI designs.
Location: Since our app filters by location, we needed to safely acquire the user's location (mainly for locals) as we allow them to pick a range. This was somewhat difficult to do on both Android and iOS through Expo. For tourists, they were allowed to pick a city where they would like to make their request. This was surprisingly difficult to do so we implemented a "hacky" way of searching cities through link.