A group of
University of Cincinnati students recently designed an iPhone app to assist with planning nights out at local bars.
The app,
NiteLife, was developed to connect the bar industry with customers by streamlining the process of finding daily specials. NiteLife identifies users' locations and all nearby bars and specials, while allowing users to narrow searches by region.
The team is comprised of five UC students: Chad Ackerman, Britney Bogard, Anna Hoop, Dave Johnson and Matt Regnold.
"We wanted to give our users an experience where they could have an idea of what the bar scene is like before they even go out," says Ackerman, one of NiteLife's creators. "So they have more confidence in the goals they're trying to reach, to have a good time and try to save money, and to kind of have a better idea of everything that is going on."
To create a user-friendly interface, NiteLife's main screen, The Buzz, sorts through each bar to only feature ones offering specials, with additional browsing options available.
"You're able to see all of the information you need up front as quickly as possible and as easily as possible," Ackerman says. "We're taking the information [users] want and pulling it to the front page."
When developing the app, the team focused primarily on ease of use and its simplistic nature.
"There's a lot of [apps] out there that have everything in them, and you can take hours to find what you wanted," says Regnold, another NiteLife creator. "This is more just focused on night life—and that specifically—so you'll only find bars."
Nitelife is currently only available for iPhone, but the creators plan to release an Android version of the app, as well as expand to surrounding areas, beginning with collegiate areas like
Miami University and others within a two-hour radius.
Other features the team plans to roll out include sorting options like draft lists and events, as well as "favoriting" bars in individualized accounts.
"The gameplan is to take [NiteLife] everywhere," Regnold says. "We took the time so far to build something that we think is going to be a great product. We want to hone in on certain things that we want to continue to improve as we get feedback from our initial users to build the best product we can."
Kyle Stone
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