Why You Have to Try Find Your Fix

The new app changing the way you find coffee in Chapel Hill & Carrboro

Posted on December 7th, 2017. at 6:32pm

Authored by Rameses the Ram, UNC Icon

As one of the top universities in the world, drinking coffee and studying at coffee shops is a daily, or at least frequent occurrence for most UNC students. However, with many First Year students never venturing over to Carrboro, and little information being out on the market about the different coffee shops, it can be intimidating to check out new coffee shops during your four years at Carolina. Find Your Fix was an app designed to help the student who is tired of going to the Starbucks on Franklin Street again find unique ‘Fixes’ (what they call coffee shops), like the Honeysuckle Tea House, located nearly eight miles from campus. Additionally, it is rare for a Chapel Hill or Carrboro resident to ever see all the coffee shops available in their local area laid out for them, and Find Your Fix does this within their app in both map and table form!

I found the app pretty easy to use the first time I opened it up. Find Your Fix is first set to display all 29 of the ‘Fixes’ in the area when you open the app, so I clicked through the pages on the table tab to see how many I had heard of. Next, I thought I would try out the different selections I could make. The user can choose if they would like their ‘Fix’ to have meal options, outdoor seating, free parking, and then the day and hours they would like to visit, and select how far from the Old Well (a central point on UNC’s campus) they would like the shop to be. For my first selection, I decided I didn’t care if the Fix had meals, I wanted free parking and outdoor seating, wanted it within two miles of campus, and I wanted to go between 1 and 4 pm on a Sunday. The app filtered the options down to seven Fixes, and then I clicked over to the map tab: there were cute little coffee cups to mark the shops!

We caught up with creators Jane La, Brian Ho, and Alaina Cole, who were toasting their success at campus favorite The Meantime Coffee Company, to chat about how they came up with Find Your Fix! They answered our questions below:

**What was your motivation for creating Find Your Fix?**

Brian: After having Frances Tong talk about Shiny in our STOR 320 class, we knew we wanted to pursue creating a Shiny app for our final project, and that it should help the user perform a useful task, just like Ms. Tong’s friend’s Beer and Burpees app.

Alaina: As a Carolina senior who loves coffee, I’m continually surprised to find a new, great coffee shop in the Chapel Hill area every few months. Often times, it takes a friend bringing me to a place they have been going to for a while to discover a new place, but I felt it could be simpler than that! Find Your Fix helps put the choice back in the user’s hands and learn what locations in the area have what they really want, when they want it.

**How could Find Your Fix be scaled to other campuses?**

Alaina: We think that Find Your Fix would be a great addition to many campus communities around the country, especially where good coffee is already in abundance. While our specific version of Find Your Fix focused on preferences that would be important to students at UNC, something like outdoor seating might not be that useful to a student going to the University of Minnesota, as the weather is not as conducive for sitting or studying outside during the school year.

We also think that a great next step could be bringing the target audience into the creation of the app for that area. Campus reps could survey students to discover what preferences they want to be able to sort their Fixes by, help confirm data, and discover baseline answers for more subjective characteristics of locations, like the noise level. Coffee lovers in an area often feel like they’re part of a community, and by scaling Find Your Fix in this way, it keeps that local, community driven feel.

**What is unique about Find Your Fix?**

Jane: What differentiates Find Your Fix from other existing sites is that it is targeted towards specific users, including UNC students. Unlike other restaurant searching websites, we have narrowed our searches to focus on the coffee shops within Chapel Hill and Carrboro area. The features that we have chosen to include in our app comes from our personal experiences as students at UNC. Because we are part of the targeted users for this app, we knew best what the users would look for when searching for their fix. In addition to general information of open and closing hours, the app gives the users informations about whether the coffee shop sells “real” food to grab while they work or has outdoor seating to enjoy the nice weather. Also, considering all types of users, we included features to tell whether the place provides parking for drivers, and the walking distances for pedestrians and a visualizations of a map to advise their way.

What were the challenges you encountered in building a Shiny App?

Brian: The very first challenge we faced when building a Shiny App was deciding how many capabilities our app can do. We had lots of great ideas about the app’s function, however, since no one in our group is a Computer Science major or an experienced coder, we did not want to draft an app that is too far beyond our ability. We finally drafted an app that is challenging, yet we were confident to successfully deliver it within the time limit of our final project.

The second huge challenge that came to our front was the reactive map. We wanted our map and table to react with the input values, but we were only able to do it with the table. Although we encountered lots of problems while building the app, we were able to solve them with effort and patience. Nonetheless, at that time we could not come up with a solution after looking at our codes again and again. After we consulted Varun for assistance, we improved the logic of the app and removed excessive lines.

Many thanks to Jane, Brian, and Alaina. Hope you enjoyed this HeelFeed Review!

Try to answer these questions using Find Your Fix:

How many coffee shops are within 2 miles of the Old Well?

How many coffee shops are open past 8pm on the weekends (Fri-Sun)?