NOOD - A comprehensive guidebook about NUS cuisine

Proposed Level of Achievement: Apollo 11

Visit the website at https://nusfood.herokuapp.com/

Motivation

When you arrive at NUS, you will tentatively be amazed by the complicated structure of the university. Because of this complication, it is a real challenge for you to find the most convenient food or beverage outlet that satisfies your thirst or hunger.

The first difficulty that you might face when finding a suitable place for your refreshment is the incompatibility of your order and your requirement. Although many food stalls of NUS are gathered in many big canteens with various options, there is still a big chance that you will be unable to have your favourite combos or order food that does not match your taste or your consumption requirement (eg. too spicy, too sour, too greasy, too much, too little …). Improving this fact is important since if food or drinks does not match your expectation, there would be a likely possibility for excessive food waste.

The second thing that can prevent you from enjoying most of NUS food offers is the isolated location and unclear direction to some canteens. Most students are only familiar with dining places in their own faculty. This comes from my experience with NUS Engineering’s Halal canteen, a place with very diverse and tasty food options but also is hidden from view. Currently NUS has its own page about dining options, but the page only provides an incomplete list of food and is also hard to navigate.

Aim

Our target is to construct a website that provides comprehensive information about NUS eateries and food options as well as an interactive platform for people to share their own experiences and recommendations. With Nood, everyone now can search and know about the various options of food and beverage offered within NUS campuses and leave useful feedback or suggestions to university’s managers on food quality and service.

User story

1. As a visitor or a freshman or exchange student, this website provides a great overview.
2. As a student who has tried a lot of NUS food, I want to discover new hidden gems.
3. As NUS staff, I want to know opinions from students and visitors about the quality of dining places on campus.
4. As a student and staff who cannot decide know what to eat, let the website recommend for you.

System features and development plan

By 1 July (Milestone 2):

• A responsive website application on Heroku
• Search and filter function
• Populate database, including opening hours, location, faculties nearby, special requirements, menu, signature dishes

By 1 August (Milestone 3):

• User login system with Google sign-in function
• Review and rating about a dining place
• Having a map with searching tool to locate the restaurant

Tech stack

• Front-end:

• Back-end:

How to run it locally

1. Go to folder ./client and run npm install to install dependencies, then npm start
2. To run the server, at home directory, install dependencies by npm install express cors mongoose dotenv. Start the server by nodemon server.

General diagram of the website:

Testers' feedbacks and implementaions:

• Feedback1: Ratings of the outlets should be displayed with additional graphic instead of mere numbers. Status: resolved
• Feedback2: There is an urgent need for an additional searching tool over the Google Map widget. Status: resolved
• Feedback3: General feedbacks on the use of colors in the website. Status: resolved
• Feedback4: People need to reply to existing comments. Status: resolved