Creating lasting ‘appiness!

We’re excited to announce that as of Wednesday 28th June, the Nandoca app is available to every restaurant and CS team in nando’s. This means that all Nandocas can now download the app by visiting Google Play or the App Store and searching for ‘Nandoca’.

If you haven’t yet heard about the Nandoca app you don’t know what you’re missing! Here, you can view news from across the business, see Central Support vacancies or view videos. If your restaurant uses the Rota Tool your Nandocas will also be able to check out their personal and full rota online too – a big change that has made a hugely positive impact on Nandocas.

But this is just the beginning, there are many more updates to the Nandoca app on the way! The best place to learn about them is by reading the news in the Nandoca app. After today, this blog will be updated less often, the main source of info about what the app team is up to, and any official updates to the app will be announced in “the app” section of the news tab.

Want to know more?
If you have any questions, please contact nandoca@nandos.co.uk, and if you have feedback you’d like to send to the app team feel free to use the feedback form here.

Thanks!

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The app is now available to the entire app panel!

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The app is now available to the entire app panel!

Back near the end of 2016 we put a call out to any restaurants that wanted to take part in the trial release of the Nandoca app. We received an amazing response: 140 restaurants told us they were interested in being a part of the app panel, and as of April those restaurants have been releasing the app to their Nandocas. Including the original test restaurants that makes 157 restaurants and nearly 6000 Nandocas that have access to the app right now!

The Nandoca app is coming to Merseyside

Last week a couple members of the Nandoca app team went out to Liverpool to take part in the Merseyside Patrao meeting. We were there because starting this week the app is being rolled out to 500 Nandocas across the 9 restaurants in the area!

Why Merseyside?

To date the app has been released to restaurants one at a time. This is a great way for us to learn what release processes work best and how the app works in different restaurants, but it isn’t a great way to reach large numbers of restaurants. To solve that we wanted to try releasing to an entire MD area all at once.

We chose to work closely with Maz (the MD) and Merseyside because we are keen to partner with a small group of restaurants to learn about the future of stories in the app. How do we make news more relevant, more local, and more valuable for Nandocas every day?

We first started working with Maz during one of our content workshops and were really excited by all the work he was doing to gather the stories coming out of his restaurants in his weekly newsletter. One of the most important functions of the app is telling stories from across the business, and we’re at a stage where we want to learn about how news can be improved. Maz’s area seemed a natural candidate as his Patraos are already used to collecting and telling stories and could help us learn ways to deliver those stories better.

The release process

Merseyside restaurants will all be receiving boxes in the post this week which contain booklets of helpful info about the app, posters for their staff room, and a couple other surprises from the app team. The launch materials will be used to support staff meetings in each restaurant, in which the Patrao and management team will work together to get Nandocas on the app.

We absolutely couldn’t do this without the help and support of all the amazing Patraos in Merseyside, and their awesome MD Maz!

Future releases

The releases don’t stop at Merseyside. We’re working towards releasing a version of the app to the app panel shortly - we’ll have more updates on that closer to the time so watch this space!

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New release: Remembering usernames and passwords is history!

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New release: Remembering usernames and passwords is history!

Ever since we first launched the Nandoca app to our 2 amazing test restaurants (shout out to Old Street and Bexleyheath!) we’ve been receiving emails about lost passwords and forgotten usernames. A few days ago we released a new version of the app with a major change that we’re super excited about: Nandocas can now log in much faster, more easily, and more securely using only their mobile number!

What the Nandoca app is made of

What the Nandoca app is made of

Most people probably won’t have thought much about the technologies that go into delivering something like the Nandoca app, and that’s fine. If we’ve done our job right, you shouldn’t ever need to be aware of what’s going on behind the scenes.

We love to share stuff though, and creating opportunities for Nandocas to learn, develop and progress, both within Nando’s and beyond, is one of the things we’re really excited about doing with the app. With that in mind, for those who are interested, here’s a whistle-stop tour of some of the technologies we’re using. We’ve included some links to where you might start if you wanted to pick up some of this stuff yourself. If you have any questions, we’d love to hear from you - you can contact our app team at nandoca@nandos.co.uk.

The difference between Prototype, Alpha and Beta.

The difference between Prototype, Alpha and Beta.

From day one, our philosophy has always been to focus on making something Nandocas will love. To achieve that, we’re committed to launching early and often to learn how people use the app, and then make changes to meet their needs. This allows us to iterate and improve quickly, but it also means the app won’t be 100% perfect and bug-free, at least initially

Introducing the Nandoca app

Over the past five months we've been designing and building an app that aims to inspire and enable all Nandocas to be the best they can be. We've been speaking to Nandocas and visiting restaurants trying to get under the skin of what it means to be a Nandoca and how we can make their lives better. 

SO, WHEN CAN I USE IT?

Well, hold on just a second there. Right now we're working with a couple of select restaurants (shout out to the amazing testers at Nando's Old Street and Nando's Bexleyheath) to refine an early prototype version of the app. That means that some of the features have been built, but many of them require lots of time-consuming manual work, so it's not really ready for wide release just yet.

When the prototype is ready, we'll start doing 'Alpha' releases to a select group of restaurants in order to help us learn what is required for the app to work for a greater numbers of users. Finally, when we're happy with it, we'll do a companywide 'Beta' release for all Nandocas. We're hoping to have the Beta release in early 2017. We'll post in greater detail soon about what these terms mean, but for now watch this space for updates.