Urban Plates is a fast-growing restaurant chain, whose focus on delicious, healthy, and affordable food is attracting a legion of passionate customers spanning from California to Washington D.C.
When Urban Plates approached CitrusBits, they were already on third-party platforms like Uber Eats and DoorDash. However, they believed that the only way to deliver a true digital experience — capable of maximizing customer satisfaction, retention, and restaurant profitability — was to provide a dedicated and custom-built mobile ordering app.
The ask? To design and develop a web experience and a mobile app on iOS and Android that connects with their existing POS (point-of-sale platform), menu, delivery, and payments systems.
Because our LA-based team members were already zealous Urban Plates regulars, CitrusBits started the project with a strong understanding of Urban Plates’ food, customer appeal, and brand pillars.
Our UI/UX designers created a flow to make the ordering process simple and fresh — while still providing the deep order customization Urban Plates’ customers expect. The design allowed users to easily customize orders for their preferences, including: specific allergies, dietary preferences, and choices of proteins and menu ingredients, for example.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we quickly pivoted to add support for curbside pickup – complete with screens to capture vehicle information — alongside the standard delivery, takeout, and dine-in ordering options.
Our engineers integrated with Urban Plates’ existing systems, such as Novadine, the ecommerce backend Urban Plates was already using for its website orders. Our team worked directly with various 3rd party vendors to master the API integrations for the POS, payments, and other integral systems. We were able to smoothly implement all the critical backend functionalities including menus, locations, ordering, payments, and delivery. Working in parallel, our frontend developers focused on delivering snappy and stable application performance.
From there, we initiated the final phase of QA testing and polished the app for release.
Since its launch on the app stores, the Urban Plates mobile app has been downloaded by thousands of eager and hungry customers and has been receiving rave reviews. The Urban Plates team was proud to unveil its very own digital restaurant experience and was especially thrilled to hit the mark for its discerning customer base.
Post-launch of their consumer-facing products, CitrusBits continues to support Urban Plates through support and maintenance, iterating and evolving the features available to enrich their customer experience.
