Use
Inspiration
“- What do you wanna eat? - Not sure, you? - Just pick something - No, YOU pick something! - Ugh…” Sounds familiar? (This is me and my girlfriend on every date) It’d be nice if SOMEBODY can make a decision for us. So, we decided to make an app that decides this for us.
How it works
Enter the amount of money you’re willing to spend, and click the button. That’s it! If you want, you can view all the menus that you can have at a particular restaurant by clicking on a restaurant’s name. The choices are made completely randomly, which makes it more fun!
Challenges we ran into
Initially we had difficulty with the front-end design of the website. It wasn’t responsive, and it was just text with plain ugly background. We spent some significant amount of time changing the UI through beta-testing on selected users, and reflected their feedbacks on our UI over the past two weeks.
Accomplishments that we’re proud of
We scraped Yelp for the menu information of almost 100 restaurants in Evanston that are within walkable distance from the school campus, and created a database containing these information. This helps the menus to load extremely fast, compared to sending API requests and processing the responses. We also made the app completely responsive, which makes it usable across all devices including mobile, tablets, and PC. Most importantly, simplicity is what defines our app: it’s simple to use, simple in design, and simple in functionality (not so simple in code).
What we learned
CSS… We suck at front-end design. Also, the patience required for scraping data.
What's next for Hungry Wildcats
Aside from some obvious and necessary improvements to UI, we plan on adding features where users can update a lot of missing data such as missing photos or missing description of different menu items. Adding these features without XSS scripting seems challenging but doable. We are also considering the possibility of porting this web application to mobile although our current version is responsive to screen-size changes in between different devices.
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