Taste the city

Taste the City is a new small business supported by a booking app for users to browse and reserve curated tastings in various cities such as Victoria, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Ottawa, and New York. This product was designed and built as a new platform to launch the owner’s business.

My role: UX/UI designer, project manager, product manager. I worked on the Pixeltree team where I collaborated with the client and development team to define, design, and develop the web app. I continue working with the client to this day designing and delivering new features and adjustments.

MVP launched in mid 2023.

Over $100K revenue made in the first year.

Taste the City won the Queen’s Entrepreneurship Competition in 2024.

Launch version of the listings page

This is the original listing page that’s been publicly available since mid 2023. As of January 2025 I am updating the UI to refine the brand identity and add a new feature the client has requested. The clientele has been an older crowd with more money so we’re looking to update the UI to reflect a more elegant, refined vibe, like a fine-dining experience.

Food Affair is another new addition coming soon that offers exclusive tastings where users need to input a password to enter the booking details page to make a reservation. These changes can be seen below.

Tasting Listings | Updated in January 2025

This is the new design for the listings page. I collaborated with the client to discuss colour palette and determine the visual identity. Using a deep emerald green and deep, near-black green, we feel offers a more sophisticated feel.

The generally available tastings are offered at the top while the Food Affair tastings have their own section below.

Tasting Details page

The Tasting detail page displays a description, image gallery, tasting details like locations and duration and reservation booking. Dietary restrictions are communicated to the restaurant to ensure participants get the correct type of dish.

As soon as a booking is made, the user is emailed and texted a confirmation.

Taste the City uses a series of scheduled texts to guide tasters from location to location. Tasters get a reminder 24 hours in advance. Then a heads up 1 hour in advance. The remainder of the texts are based on the number of locations, walking time, and duration of each location. This info is entered by the admin in the back end (pictures of this below!).

Restaurant dashboard

As soon as bookings are made, the reservation time for each location is calculated and updated on the restaurant’s front end. Each reservation includes the time, name, size of party, and dietary restrictions. When tasters arrive the restaurant verifies a 4-digit automatically generated code (sent to the taster via text) and checks them in.

Admin panel | Tastings table

For the admin panel, we typically use a third-party platform called Avo. This is the Tastings page which shows all the tastings in the system. From here you can create a new tasting.

Admin panel | Create new tasting

Creating a new tasting first involves creating some base details like name, description, cost, and seats.

Admin panel | Compose tastings

Once a base tasting is create, the admin will add stops, which are restaurants that have been added to the system. Duration and travel time minutes are set here which calculates the reservation times for the participating restaurants. The admin also creates tasting times that can be booked on the front end.

Tasting texts

A core feature of Taste the City is the guided texts sent to the tasters and includes:

  • Thank you for booking with booking code

  • 24 hour reminder text

  • 30 minute reminder

  • Descriptive text per restaurant with map - scheduled based on time per restaurant

  • We hope you enjoyed your Tasting! with survey

Walkess tastings are similar except that there is no map per stop since the tasting takes place at a single location. Texts also describe each “stop” as a “dish” to recontextualize the term.