What is Sayfe?
Sayfe is an NFC-powered communication tool built for people who live with dietary restrictions. The core idea is simple: tap your phone and your restrictions are instantly transmitted to the restaurant's POS system in their language, before you even order.
This project followed the Design Thinking methodology, completed within a three week sprint at the European Innovation Academy in Portugal. Our research found that most people with dietary restrictions don't use technology to communicate their allergies in a restaurant setting.
The problem at hand.
Traveling abroad means navigating a new culture, a new language, and if you have dietary restrictions, a new set of risks every time you sit down to eat. I experienced this firsthand in Portugal — four allergic reactions from tree nuts hidden in candies and chocolates I couldn't identify or translate in time.
The World Health Organization reports that 60% of the world's population deals with dietary restrictions. Yet most of them are still relying on translation apps that were never built for this specific conversation.
Typing out a restriction, waiting for a translation, hoping the server understands the nuance — that process breaks down exactly when it matters most. The question became: what would it look like to remove that friction entirely?
What already existed — and why it wasn't enough.
The most obvious existing solution is Google Translate. Most travelers already have it, it supports 100+ languages, and it works offline. On paper it solves the problem. In practice it doesn't. Accuracy drops significantly depending on the language, and complex phrases like "no cross-contamination between shellfish" don't translate cleanly.
There's also the time cost. You have to type out your restriction, wait for the translation, then show it to a server who may or may not understand the nuance. In a busy restaurant, that process breaks down fast.
From food encyclopedia to communication tool.
Our original idea wasn't a communication tool at all. We started with a food encyclopedia — a database of traditional dishes mapped to their ingredients. Useful in theory, but not useful enough to earn a download. You already have Google.
Over a day or two of brainstorming the team was split and we didn't have a clear direction. Our mentor told us to write down every idea we had, even the ones that weren't physically possible yet — just to get things out of our heads and onto paper.
Combined with my own experience struggling to communicate my restrictions — and a memory from working at an ice cream shop back home where customers who didn't speak English tried to order on a Square till that already had NFC built into it — it all connected. Communication was the problem. NFC was already in the room. We just needed to point it at the right conversation.
What we discovered.
Our mentor encouraged us to generate as many ideas as possible without filtering ourselves early. The most outrageous concepts were welcome. Volume first, evaluation later.
Universally known allergy symbols rose to the top quickly. Most countries already recognize a standardized set regulated by the WHO, so we didn't need to invent a visual language from scratch. We incorporated them directly into the app as allergy icons.
Image scanning was ruled out after serious consideration. AI scanning a dish in a restaurant setting creates too many failure points — every dish is made differently, a scan could misidentify entirely, and most critically the dish would already be in front of you. That's the wrong end of the problem.
Why NFC.
QR codes were the first alternative we considered. Most Square stands and iPads don't have cameras, and even where they do, security restrictions get in the way. QR codes also only push data in one direction with no back and forth.
Next time you walk into a restaurant, take a look around. Square stands and iPads are everywhere, and people are already tapping their phones on them to pay daily. We saw that same infrastructure as our opportunity — a server walks up, you tap the stand, and your dietary restrictions are transmitted to the POS in the restaurant's language before you even order.
Low-fidelity wireframes.
Before opening Figma I drew out the full app flow on paper. It's a step a lot of people skip in the interest of time, but jumping straight into mid-fidelity without it meant backtracking later — and that costs more time than it saves.
The wireframes helped us work out one specific problem: where does the NFC card live on screen and how does the user interact with it? We landed on a tap-to-expand interaction, similar to how Apple Wallet works. Tapping the card scales it up and surfaces all of the user's dietary information in one action.
Mapping the journey.
Once we landed on our solution, I mapped out the user journey so everyone on the team was working from the same picture. The first thing you do when you open Sayfe is set up your allergy profile. The restaurant recommendations pull from that data, the NFC card transmits that data. Without it the app has nothing to work with — so profile setup as the entry point was the only place to start.
What Sayfe needed to feel like.
Before we touched Figma we aligned on what Sayfe needed to feel like. A helping hand. Trustworthy, reliable, and approachable enough that you'd feel confident tapping your phone before ordering food without a second thought.
Green came from that same place. Psychologically it reads as health, nature, something living — not clinical, not corporate. We were designing for people managing something that genuinely affects their livelihoods, so the app needed to feel safe rather than intimidating.
The structure was modeled on UberEats and DoorDash — immediately intuitive. The NFC card screen followed Apple Pay logic so the tap interaction felt second nature. The minimal layout and Inter as the font came from the same place: Sayfe only works if it stays out of your way.
Every feature went through the same filter.
Does this reduce friction for someone dining in an unfamiliar place, or does it add to it?
Restaurant recommendations were built around three things you'd naturally consider: whether the restaurant can accommodate your restrictions, how close it is, and whether it fits your budget. Saved restaurants lets you return to places that worked without searching again. Recently viewed fights decision paralysis. The NFC card sits at the centre of all of it.
Watching someone use it.
With the time constraints of a three week sprint, formal usability testing wasn't on the table. Instead I ran an informal round with a couple of friends who were studying UX at the time. I walked them through the app flow and observed where they hesitated.
The most useful finding: it wasn't clear to the user that tapping the NFC card would expand it and activate it for use on an NFC reader. They didn't know the interaction existed. To fix that I added the universal share symbol to the bottom of the card — something people already recognize that tells them what to do next without thinking about it.
The header font size was also increased for legibility after that session. Small changes, but ones that came directly from watching someone use the app rather than assuming it worked.
Proof we were pointing at something real.
To validate our idea before touching Figma, we pushed sign-up forms out through Instagram and the academy's public WhatsApp chats.
Restaurants want more customers. Becoming more inclusive is one of the simplest ways to do that. Those 13 letters told us that the people actually running these businesses saw the same opportunity we did — and were willing to put it in writing.
What I'd carry into every project after this.
Where Sayfe could go next.
Since completing the project I've come across T Order — a tableside ordering system used in restaurants that operates on a tablet. It's exactly the kind of setup Sayfe was built for. The tablet is already NFC-equipped, sits at the table without requiring a server as a middleman, and if paired with Sayfe it could filter out dishes based on the user's dietary restrictions before they even browse the menu.
That kind of integration would have taken Sayfe from a communication tool to a fully seamless dining experience — and it's something I'd want to explore if the project were to continue.