• admin
• November 7, 2023
• UI/UX

Take EyesOn for a Test Drive

I’ll admit, I was skeptical. An app that promises to identify a restaurant just from a photo sounds like one of those ideas that works great in a demo video and falls apart the second you try it in real life. So I did what any reasonable skeptic does: I took EyesOn out for an actual walk around the neighborhood and put it to the test.

Stop One: The Place With No Sign I Could Read

First test case, and I picked a tough one on purpose — a little spot two blocks from my apartment with a sign in a script font I’ve never been able to fully make out, even squinting. I opened EyesOn, framed the storefront, and tapped the shutter.

Two seconds. Maybe three. Before I’d even lowered my phone, the screen had already flipped over to a Yelp card: name, 4.3 stars, “Neighborhood gem” tagged in the review snippets, and a photo grid of dishes that instantly explained the small crowd by the door. I’d walked past this place probably thirty times. I finally knew what it was called.

Stop Two: Testing the Edges

Feeling good, I decided to make it harder. I found a restaurant with an awning so faded the name was barely legible, half-covered by a delivery bike parked out front. This felt like the moment EyesOn would trip up.

It didn’t. A beat longer than the first scan — maybe five seconds — but it still landed on the right match, apparently leaning on the partial text it could read plus my GPS location to narrow things down. A little “matched via nearby signage” note even flashed under the result, which was a nice touch. It wasn’t pretending to be magic; it was showing its work.

Stop Three: The Impulse Test

This is the one that actually sold me. I was crossing the street, not really looking for anywhere new, when a restaurant patio caught my eye — string lights, a chalkboard special I couldn’t read from that distance, people clearly having a good time. Old habit: I’d normally make a mental note to “look it up later” and, let’s be honest, never actually do it.

Instead, phone up, one tap, done. By the time I’d crossed the street, I had the full Yelp listing sitting in my hand — hours, popular dishes, a five-minute wait estimate from a review posted that same afternoon. That night, I was there for dinner instead of adding it to the graveyard of restaurants I meant to check out.

The Verdict

What struck me most wasn’t the accuracy, though that held up better than I expected across faded signs, partial views, and low evening light. It was how little friction there was between curiosity and information. No typing a name I wasn’t sure how to spell. No scrolling past three wrong results with similar names. Just: see it, scan it, know it.

EyesOn isn’t trying to replace the experience of discovering a restaurant — it’s trying to catch that spark of “what is this place?” before it fades into “eh, I’ll look it up later” and quietly disappears. On my test drive, it did exactly that, three times out of three.

Next stop: seeing how it handles a food truck with no sign at all.