Inspiration
We were inspired by the hit-or-miss meals at the Columbia dining halls and the countless, unfortunate wastes of a dining hall swipe on a subpar meal. With the rise of the unpredictability of the quality of the CU dining hall meals, it is even more necessary for students to know the quality of the meal before deciding to use a precious swipe. We want to make sure that students are getting a healthy, happy meal and using their dining hall swipes more wisely through our app.
What it does
With our app, users with Columbia UNIs can view the current day's Columbia dining hall menus and the other users' ratings for those menu items. They can submit their own reviews and ratings for the Columbia dining hall menu like a food critic!
How we built it
We built a high-fidelity prototype for our app using Figma and implemented a web app. With our web app, using a web scraper, the current day's menu items are extracted from the Columbia Dining website. Then these are displayed on our web app, then users can view the ratings and write their own reviews of the menu items. Additionally, using Python and Scrapy, we built a web-scraper that fetches the current day’s menu items and exports them to a text file, which can then be incorporated into a developed app.
Challenges we ran into
We struggled with learning to prototype and also scraping menus data, which include the picture and the name of the dishes, from the Columbia Dining website since these were both things we had little experience with. In addition, the use of Docker in web scraping poses a challenge with many errors along the way, but luckily, with the help of team members we were able to figure out the process.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of learning web scraping and making our prototype user-friendly and detailed using Figma. In addition, we chose to implement our ideas through web development, utilizing HTML and CSS to demonstrate what CUEats will be like in the future.
What we learned
We learned about web scraping, building a high-fidelity prototype using Figma, collaboration, and more about web development.
What's next for CUEats
We hope to make our CUEats web app more user-friendly and accessible to physical disabilities. We would have to do more user research and spend more time to ensure that our app's design is more user-friendly. We also hope to partner with Columbia Dining to fully implement this system with the Dining website, so that it can be available and accessible to all students.
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