If there’s one thing McCormick sophomore Aiden Lee said he could change about Northwestern’s dining, it was the Dine On Campus app. It felt like it took 30 seconds of loading just to pull up a menu, and there was no way to “favorite” dishes, Lee said.
So Lee did.
Lee said he grabbed the data that Dine On Campus utilizes and coded a program that lists menus in a way he found to be more intuitive. After it caught on among his friends, Lee said he turned it into a web app: NUFood.
“Honestly, the reason it started was, I’m a person that loves to know the food that I like and where it is,” Lee said.
Depending on the time of day, NUFood will show the appropriate breakfast, lunch or dinner menu, Lee said — which sounds simple. However, Dine On Campus defaults to breakfast regardless of time.
NUFood also allows users to “favorite” dishes and keep tabs on when they show up at mealtime. Lee said his app also fixes the issue of extended loading time that users face while operating the Dine On Campus app.
NUFood has been averaging 100 users a day, Lee said.
The web app has seen increased popularity after Lee debuted NUFood on LinkedIn, where he said 400 users viewed the site in a day. He then posted it on the Reddit forum r/Northwestern — from before someone else posted a screenshot of the Reddit post and shared it on the campus social media app Fizz.
“The response has been a lot more than I thought,” Lee said. “I don’t have (Fizz). I had no clue that that happened until a friend told me.”
Lee said he has some more ideas for NUFood features, though they have been on the back burner. In the meantime, he has had a couple of startup companies reach out for job interviews, he said.
McCormick sophomore Jonathan Schiff is Lee’s friend, and he said he uses NUFood a few times a week.
“Now, if I have time to be choosing any dining hall I want to go to, it’s a lot easier to look through NUFood,” Schiff said. “It’s quick. It really takes no mental effort.”
McCormick sophomore Sawyer Madison, Lee’s roommate, also said that Dine On Campus was a “pain in the neck.” It was something he noticed but never verbalized until Lee’s idea.
Now, Madison said he’s witnessed Lee become passionate about a project that once spawned for the purpose of his friends.
“I know that he’s really enjoyed doing something that actually has users and real use cases, like Northwestern students are actually using it,” Madison said. “It’s more than just a silly computer science project.”
Email: [email protected]
X: @_melodyxu
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