Locally StuckMOBILIZING THE EXPERIENCE AT A GLANCE

Tools for a thesis exploration

Jennifer Shim Jennifer Shim & Richard PéanCommunication Design and Technology BFA programParsons, The New School for Design

1

Visualizing overall dining experiences with short videos of restaurants, which will provide information

about these restaurants in one application, will help users capture a little taste and ambiance of a place

before users even visit the restaurant. By having this application service, users will be able to find

affordable, delicious foods and will also be connected to local restaurants that already lack a younger

demographic; as a result, restaurants and end-users will benefit from this service-product.

So what’s the problem here?

There are already plenty of blog websites and television shows out there regarding the overall review

of the food of a chosen restaurant. However, even with all of these food blogs, television shows, and

restaurant review websites, these is still no bridge or communication between small businesses and

hungry, needy consumers eager to learn about the local hidden restaurant gems. These shows, such

as the Food Network or Travel Channel, lack in showing the true hidden affordable gems of New

York City and fail to deliver an application where consumers can go back and revisit the featured

restaurants.

Who’s organizing what part of the project?

My partner, Richard Pean, and I will both focus on the design aspect of the project this semester.

More specifically, I will be scouting to obtain content information about each restaurant to aesthetically

and efficiently profile into a mobile application. Richard will be designing the user interface and user

experience of the website and will be learning all the new coding languages that is to come and will

be further explained in his paper. I will be working alongside Richard by designing the UI/UX of the

mobile application as well to make sure it remains consistent with the website. While I design the UI/

UX of the mobile app and scout restaurant profiles to capture through image and video, I will also

be learning basic objective C to prepare myself to code the mobile app with Richard the following

semester. I will mainly focus on the Lower Manhattan area to scout for local restaurants that are

affordable for young adults and college students. However, because we need the content and branding

first, promotion of the application and each restaurant we feature will come second semester or right

2

after the designs and various coding of the website is finished. Our overall focus is to help delicious

local food businesses in New York City, who are struggling to get their restaurant exposed, become

more exposed through use of new media, smart-phone technology, and different methods of social

media advertising for their young adult consumers to find them effectively and efficiently. However, this

semester, we are solely focusing on obtaining content and finishing design styles for both the web and

mobile apps.

How to create legitimacy for the creators?

In order for our brand to look on a professional scale and for our users and local businesses to trust

us, I will be creating a separate “company” site for Richard and I, the creators. Our company name will

be “StuffsDope” at www.shimjen.com/stuffsdope. It will be designed in a way to portray us as always

being busy with several client projects and continuously designing other web design companies, similar

to the two-man team “Thesearethings” (These are things) or Monkey Do LLC (Murtaugh, Tim and

Michael Pick), the creators of EdibleCity.com (LLC, Monkey Do).

Why young consumers?

We chose our main demographic to be young adults aging between 18 to 29 years for a reason. Young

adults, including college students, do not enjoy boring places and definitely do not have much time

to find an affordable place to eat at between meetings or classes. “The average tuition at a four-year

public university climbed 15%” (Armario, Christine) from 2008, which ultimately marked the beginning

of the recession. Tuition rates are climbing and students, even after graduation and with a job, will

be paying off their tuition debt for years. “Students are negotiating scholarship packages, avoiding

application fees, and taking on part-time jobs to help pay for their higher education pursuits” (Sheehy,

Kelsey). Because of this recession and the rising cost of higher education, rising, young adults need

help finding affordable, delicious restaurants to eat at between their busy schedules.

Why do we need to use new media technology, why not just be simple like Zagat magazine or

pamphlets?

3

New media technology, like smart phone applications and the web, is mainly used by our target

audience. “People between the ages of 25 and 34 are more likely to own a smartphone (62%) than any

other age group, while 44.6% of smartphone users are between the age 18-34” (ANSON, ALEX).

---(graph)---

The young adult age group seems to be most consistent with their use in smartphones, thus explaining

why we should stick with this demographic. While the smartphones vary in different operating systems,

we chose to stick with the iPhone because “iPhone users download more apps on a monthly basis

(48 apps/mo.) compared to users of other mobile operating systems.” (ANSON, ALEX). On the

other hand, Zagat has been around since 1982 (Guide, OV) to build their brand and different age

group community. In our case, we only have less than a year to finish an app while using new media

technology for the quickest way to help build and promote our brand for consumers and locals.

How do we know that these restaurants are struggling?

Statistics show that about “800 out of 1,000 restaurants that open this year in New York City will fail in

the next 5 years.” (Laya, Patricia).

---(graph)---

4

Why do these local restaurant businesses keep failing? Since the recession in 2008, local businesses

have been dropping left and right getting “slammed by the financial crisis.” (Pace, Gina). This explains

why these local mom and pop restaurants do not have effective ways of exposing or promoting

themselves to their young tech savvy consumers.

So who cares?

Local restaurants care because they need to find a better way to bridge their communication

with young consumers in order to create more revenue for their business. Young adults and

college students also care to find and experience local delicious spots efficiently and quickly

before they even go to the restaurant in order to save money and time.

What needs to be continuously researched?

Because young adults use their smartphones on a daily basis (ANSON, ALEX), they

are naturally accustomed to reading massive amounts of data in a simple interface on

their mobile applications. As a result, I will be continuously researching new mobile

design styles and better effective ways to appropriate massive data into a clear efficient

User Interface and Experience to aid me in the process of designing the mobile app. I

will also be researching ways to effectively capture a restaurant’s ambiance and food

through film and photography for a young adult demographic. For instance, the young

5

adults demographic are accustomed to having everything in front of them quickly and

efficiently, so I would keep these video reels very short to about 15-30 seconds in order

to not bore the users. I will also research what attracts young adults through film and

sound by integrating a hint of sarcasm in the 15-30 second restaurant video profiles so

users can obtain massive amounts of data about a certain restaurant in a comedic video

short. How do you even research comedy and film? Through the plethora of popular

webisode series and mobile apps out in the world, I will be inspecting my precedents

to figure out the pros and cons of each company to see what they are doing is indeed

effective.

So why spend a year creating this very ambitious project?

New York City is filled with local businesses; however, the restaurant industry is the one

industry that is directly and initially affected by the economy. New local restaurants have

been opening and closing left and right. Thus, it is harder for young adults and students

to find these hidden gems to keep the economy flowing while keeping themselves

satisfied. Ever since the recession in 2008, young adults have been struggling to find

hidden mom and pop restaurants because those restaurants lack a level of exposure

through social media. Mom and pop restaurants have been struggling to keep their

users coming to their restaurants because they lack the resources to keep their

location on the web. It is difficult to fully satisfy users if they cannot easily access these

delicious, affordable eats. It is important to find a way to keep both ends of the party

satisfied while the economy strengthens.

How will we work together as a team?

6

Because Richard will mainly figure out the UI/UX aspect of the website and I will bring

in the content to put on the site, we will have to work together by keeping the imagery,

film, and content consistent to be appealing to our younger demographic. The content

would have to match the style of our UI/UX design as well. This explains why I am also

creating the UI/UX of the mobile application. For instance, we know our target audience

is for humor loving, young adults on a budget so we will team up to make sure that the

film and imagery will be young, humorous, relatable, and brief. To accompany that style

through web, Richard will work with me to figure out a way for users to obtain all that

information quickly through an efficient and young-looking UI/UX.

Which precedents during research will help?

Most review and location based sites like EdibleCity (LLC, Monkey Do) or Yelp (Inc, Yelp) have a

map API of where the local business is located but does not contain high-end image content of the

food itself. When it comes to food, consumers want to see the product itself: the food. That's why with

the many review sites already available on the web, people need to sort through and read consumer

comments which are usually complaints about the restaurant’s service or quality of the food served.

With our site, we want to give our consumers what they want very quickly so they do not have to waste

time clicking around and opening new browsers. As a solution, we want to keep our users on the main

mobile app and not let them deviate from it by opening new safari browsers or map applications within

their iPhones.

---(screenshot of each app - Left: EdibleCity, Right: Yelp)---

7

Stuck on Earth is a tool that enables photographers to document areas around the world

and develop an album that can be viewed by other users showcasing a curated experience

(StuckonEarth).This is a great precedent, for it helps traveling photographers tremendously by

showcasing only high quality images (that are curated through the owners). In this case, most of the

users have professional cameras to aid them in the process of creating content. On the other hand,

the majority of my target audience are on a budget and do not own professional camera equipment to

create a user-based content flow. Therefore, I will be manually scouting out each restaurant to create a

feel for the food and space.

GoogaMooga is a platform that uses Google Maps API to show real time locations of food venders

only inside the festival (LLC, Superfly Festivals New York). The mobile app has the ability to add

dishes you've already had and add dishes you want to try while at the GoogaMooga event to help pick

and choose from each vendor. GoogaMooga uses fun ways to find and pick certain dishes or vendors,

but only within the event. Alas, LocallyStuck will also have the “fun” aspect in the app, except it will be

for the Lower Manhattan area. LocallyStuck users will be able to “heart” or “like” their favorite places to

eat at and will have their own profile using Facebook Login to save and share the types of foods and

restaurants they absolutely loved.

---(screenshot of each app - Left:Stuck On Earth, Right: GoogaMooga)---

8

Smosh has been creating fun and humorous cheaply-made videos since 2006 and eventually

worked their way up to creating better quality and thought-out videos to create a larger fan-based

community (LLC, Alloy). They helped publicize their own brand by social media tools like the website

Newgrounds.com (Fulp, Tom). By uploading their fun video shorts on this site and Youtube, they were

able to catch their audiences’ eyes and eventually after a few years were able to host their videos on

their own server/site. LocallyStuck will research deeper in ways that Smosh has promoted themselves

in the following semester. Currently, I will be focusing on how video shorts like Smosh, has accustomed

their video humor and content to their demographic. I will continue to research Smosh and other video

shorts to customize our videos to reach out to our specific young adult demographic. We will be using

Youtube or a Vimeo API as our video host on the mobile and web app because Youtube/Vimeo already

has a huge fan-based community and it will be an easier and quicker way to spread the word on

restaurants (Youtube) (Vimeo).

---(screenshot of app - Smosh)---

9

All in all, my portion of the thesis and Richard’s portion will be a very ambitious project to tackle

because it requires a whole business plan and concept in order to launch this mobile and web

application. There are several skills we need to learn ourselves with the help of the following

mentors: William Bevington for concept idea and information architecture, Doris Yee for Web

and mobile beta testing experience, Scott Cushman (my uncle) for Objective C mobile app

coding, and Joseph Kim for coding (my direct manager at work).

10

Bibliography / References

Main Thesis Process Site: a.parsons.edu/~shimj574 Armario, ChristineArmario, Christine, and Associated Press. "Average cost of four-year university up 15% – USATODAY.com." News, Travel, Weather, Entertainment, Sports, Technology, U.S. & World - USATODAY.com. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/economy/story/2012-06-13/college-costs-surge/55568278/1 (accessed October 15, 2012). Sheehy, KelseySHEEHY, KELSEY , and USNEWS EDUCATION. "10 Colleges With the Most Expensive Room and Board - US News and World Report." US News & World Report | News & Rankings | Best Colleges, Best Hospitals, and more. http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/the-short-list-college/articles/2012/09/18/10-colleges-with-the-most-expensive-room-and-board (accessed October 15, 2012). ANSON, ALEXAnson, Alexander. "Smartphone Usage Statistics 2012 [Infographic] | AnsonAlex." Technology, Tutorials, Social Media and Infographics - AnsonAlex. http://ansonalex.com/infographics/smartphone-usage-statistics-2012-infographic/ (accessed October 15, 2012). Laya, PatriciaLaya, Patricia. "80% Of New York Restaurants Close In First Five Years - Business Insider." Business Insider. http://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-restaurants-fail-rate-2011-8?op=1 (accessed October 15, 2012). Pace, GinaPace, Gina. "NYC restaurants slammed by financial crisis - Business - Local business | NBC News." Breaking News & Top Stories - World News, US & Local | NBC News. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27106533/ns/business-local_business/t/nyc-restaurants-slammed-financial-crisis/#.UHsymWnBLDM (accessed October 15, 2012).

11

Guide, OVGuide, Online Video. "Nina Zagat Video | Interviews." OVGuide | Online Video Guide - Watch Free Videos. http://www.ovguide.com/nina-zagat-9202a8c04000641f8000000000afb3c3 (accessed October 15, 2012). LLC, Monkey DoLLC, Monkey Do. "Edible City | Find Food Trucks in New York." Edible City | Find Food Trucks in New York. http://www.ediblecity.com (accessed October 15, 2012). Inc, YelpInc, Yelp. "Yelp New York." Yelp. http://www.yelp.com (accessed October 15, 2012). StuckonEarthon Earth, Stuck. "Stuck on Earth." Stuck on Earth. http://www.stuckonearthapp.com/ (accessed October 15, 2012). LLC, Superfly Festivals New YorkLLC, Superfly Festivals New York. "The Great GoogaMooga Festival." The Great GoogaMooga Festival. http://www.googamooga.com (accessed October 15, 2012). These are thingsAdrion, Jen, and Omar Noory. "These Are Things - Home of the Modern World Map." These Are Things - Home of the Modern World Map. http://www.thesearethings.com/ (accessed October 15, 2012). Murtaugh, Tim and Michael PickMURTAUGH, TIM, and MICHAEL PICK . "Monkey Do | Web Design and Development." Monkey Do | Web Design and Development. http://monkeydo.biz/ (accessed October 15, 2012). LLC, Alloy LLC, Alloy Digital. "Funny Pictures, Humor, Funny Videos, Internet Comedy | SMOSH." SMOSH. http://www.smosh.com/ (accessed October 15, 2012). Fulp, TomFulp, Tom. "Newgrounds.com — Everything, By Everyone." Newgrounds.com — Everything, By Everyone. http://www.newgrounds.com (accessed October 15, 2012).

12