There were a number of challenges that we had to face while developing this application. Here's a breif discussion about what they were and how we overcame them!
NO PUBLIC API FOR TAPINGO
We needed to get data about the menus and hours for the restaurants on campus.
To solve this problem, we seeded data for each place from observation so users could still get an idea of the flow of the app
Information about a student's declining balance/eating and spedning habits isn't publically available due to privacy concerns.
To over-come this we started with some preset macros/daily budgets based on student meal plan options, goals and excersize frequency - which the user would provide on registration.
Our app is heavily dependent on the data we are trying to present and so a big challenge was to figure out how best to organise it.
Admittedly, we should have involved more user studies to answer this question but as a short term solution we used the industry standard design.
The fist step before any of the fancy features we want is possible would be to figure out how to get data. We could start with building the web-scrapper to get information of the dining hall website but the problem of extracting student's personal data would still be a problem. However, a short term solution could be to improve the current interface where students "add" what they have eaten to make is as intuive as possible
A lot of the participants in the user studies mentioned wanting to able to view a history of what they ate on a particular day/week/month and we agree that this is essential! In addition to the progress bar and food diary feature - we also think we could introduce some analytics that could analyze your eating/spending trends and provide some helpful charts about it!
Eating disorders are very prevelant amongst the college going age group and it would therefore be important for a platform like ours to address it through:
Another future step to take would be to consult with the nutrition specialists at UR to come with a list of healthy food items/combinations amongst the food options on campus and also create a general FAQ about food page.
While a vast majority of students on campus are on all-declining plans or spend declining, it is not the only mode of payment and so it is important to make the inclusive and repesenattive of the entire student body.
Given that every student will have a unique goal and eating preference. In the future it would be nice to make the app more customizable via: