Imagine entering a restaurant and not knowing what to order. If only your foodie friends were with you – after all, you trust and would love their opinion! Sure, you could contact each of them individually and ask them what they’d recommend, but if you were all part of ChekPlate the task would be so much easier.
ChekPlate is
a new free app that allows users to quickly review restaurants from their
phone. How it differs from Urbanspoon or Yelp is you can limit your search to
reviews from “Friends”, “Friend’s of Friends” or “All Users”. So, nagging
doubts about the validity of the opinions of strangers can be filtered out leaving
you with only the opinions of those you trust and value most.
It was easy
to sign up and start using, the entire process took less than five minutes to
find it on the App Store, download, sign up and start. Since I used it during
its launch phase, ChekPlate didn’t automatically find my friends, but there are
options to search through you phone, Facebook or Twitter contacts to add them
quickly. So, though the app I sent out
an invite to several of my friends and once they were registered ChekPlate instantly
recognized them and allowed me to connect with them.
The user
interface is simplistic with a similar layout to the tiles on an iPhone making
it intuitive to use. In the end, if you have any technologically challenged
friends or family members this may be an easier system for them to figure out.
Personally, I
found the app worked best when you were at the restaurant and found the
establishment using the “Nearby” option. The system would list restaurants in
the area usually with the one I was visiting found first given its closest. Whereas,
trying to review a restaurant by “Name” was sometimes unsuccessful especially
when visiting a newer establishment – I guess it’s similar to other rating
sites where you are relying on individuals to update the search results. Moreover, even if the restaurant doesn’t show
up in the list when using the “Nearby” search, the app allows you to add a
restaurant and it will prefill the address portion of the listing on your
behalf.
Adding an
opinion at the restaurant didn’t take much time given you really just need to
choose a rating out of 5 for food, service and price. Then, if you want you can include comments (I
found this was useful for listing dishes that were good or horrible) or a
picture - the amount of time to spend depends on you. All in all, I’d say the
average review took about three minutes so I normally did it while waiting for
the bill.
ChekPlate
does have limitations. Firstly, since it can’t be accessed through a computer
(unless I couldn’t figure out how) the post relies on your phone to type up
entries; so, it’s not conducive to long detailed reviews. Similar to other sites, you can add photos
but can’t put the photos directly into the review itself. Consequently, when a
restaurant has multiple reviews it gets hard to decipher which photo goes with
which post. Lastly, as with most social media, it relies on the network effect where individuals will want to use it as more of their friends join. At this point, given only a few of my friends have downloaded the app (but aren't active users) ChekPlate's benefit of getting their opinions is limited. But, if you join and want to follow someone please feel free to add gastroworldblog@gmail.com to your contacts and we can connect!
In the end,
ChekPlate appears to be better suited for quick reviews that are short and
sweet (well maybe not sweet if it’s a bad one). Think of it as the Twitter of
the review world, where you do a short blast to your friends and family. I used
ChekPlate to simply tell my followers what my favourite dishes were and what to
avoid but the rationale to my choices were left out. Who knows, maybe sometimes
people don’t even care about the painstaking details I write about. With so
many articles reporting on how attention spans get shorter with every new
generation, perhaps ChekPlate will become the next phase on how we rate restaurants?
Disclaimer: The product was complimentary basis and this is a sponsored post. However, the opinions expressed, as always, are honest and my own.
Like the blog? You can now follow me on twitter for notifications - https://twitter.com/GastroWorldBlog
