HuskyEats

For our project, we were inspired to create something that would help people in our local community. We decided to focus on students at the UW campus because we know this demographic the best. When brainstorming what program might be beneficial to students, we explored the resources that were already available. We looked at the HFS website for on-campus food options, we noticed that none of the websites had listed the menus for each restaurant nor what they were serving as specials for the day. Since menus for different on-campus restaurants and cafes can change so frequently, students often won’t know what’s available until they are there, which can be quite inconvenient.

For our submission, we created a mobile application that will allow students to interact directly with dining services. Our application will allow people in the food services to enter live updates to the applications so that students can be aware of menu changes or any inconveniences, such as broken toasters. Students will be able to view the dining option’s hours, location, current menu, and any updates submitted.

Some of the challenges we ran into included merging code and optimizing effective usability. We also had some difficulties when trying to change the text on the student interface to display the updates being made on the dining option interface. We continued to work at this problem through trial and error and eventually overcame this issue. However, we did not have time to fix the design of the user interfaces, for the most effective user experience, but we hope to work on this in the future.

For future improvements, we can add filters for the search button, such as by dining options that are currently open, by dietary restrictions, by closest to current location, or by price range. Since our app currently only uses 4 restaurants as an example, we plan on adding the rest of the on-campus dining to create a more comprehensive list including markets, cafes, food trucks, and more. We learned a lot about app-building and how to work concurrently on the same app using different devices. We also learned how to cooperate and problem-solve as a team to create a better project.