Long-Awaited D-hall App Released to Improve Meals
The Exeter Dining Hall smartphone app, which allows students to review the dining hall menu, has been available for download from the Apple App Store for about two weeks. Developed by seniors Aivant Goyal and Eric Tang, with the help of dining service staff and the IT department, the app is a convenient alternative to the current menu provided by the online schedule webpage, ols.exeter.edu. The dining hall app includes many helpful features; it even displays dining hall notifications about birthdays or other special events.
Unlike its counterpart, the online schedule webpage, the new dining hall app is meant to be interactive—students can rate a meal out of five stars and write reviews. So far, almost 400 different users have entered over 1000 ratings on various dishes. Luckily, the app creators incorporated a “geofence” into the code, meaning that only people within the Exeter vicinity can post reviews. This keeps non-Exonians (especially those from Andover) from spamming the app or writing useless reviews.
Goyal said that, while creating the app, he envisioned students using it in two ways: firstly, to check the menu for the day in order to decide which dining hall to attend and secondly, to rate dishes so that peers can know what dishes to try or not try. He mentioned that creating a user-friendly interface was a main focus for Eric and him throughout the designing process, and that students reacted positively to the app’s design. “During beta testing, we got a lot of positive reviews about its easy-to-use interface and its usefulness,” Goyal said.
Students also said that they really enjoyed the review feature of the app. Senior Julia Friberg said that, in reviewing dishes, she hopes to help the dining hall staff improve some dishes. “As someone who’s really into cooking, I really want subtle feedback on what I’m eating, so I really enjoyed being able to say that something was a little too salty, or something was a little too sweet,” Friberg said.
“After a bit of deliberation, we decided it would be fun to take on the forever-rumored app for the dining halls.”
Tang said that he was impressed by the number of students already using the app to review dishes and the quality of the reviews submitted. “We’ve been pleasantly surprised by how detailed and thoughtful some of the comments on dishes are, and by the wide variety of constructive criticism users have sent in,” Tang said.
Some students were hopeful that the app would strengthen communication between themselves and dining hall staff. “I think it’s a really useful tool to actually communicate with D-hall to tell them what we think of the food and ways that they can improve,” upper Emily Green said. “I think that it will make our meals a lot better and bridge the divide between D-hall and the student body.”
Although many students reviewed the app positively, some expressed frustration at the discrepancy between what they read on the app menu and what the actual menu is when they arrive at the dining hall. “It’s pretty accurate,” lower Inumidun Oyebode said. “One thing is, it has the menu that also shows up on the ols [online schedule] app, except that’s not always what they serve at D-hall.” Others also mentioned that they were unhappy that they could not download the app onto their phone, since only certain types of phones are compatible with the app’s software. “I would like to download the app on my phone, but I can’t access the app on my Samsung,” upper Anna Clark said.
Overall, students are very impressed with the app’s design and are even more impressed with their fellow students for taking the time and effort to program the app. “I’m very proud of my classmates, Aivant and Eric, for putting the app together,” Friberg said. “They’re incredible.”
Goyal and Tang did indeed put countless hours into the app’s creation, which began in the summer of 2015. At the beginning of that summer, they took an online course in app development together. “By the end of July, we started brainstorming some possible projects for us to take our new skill for a test,” Goyal said. “After a bit of deliberation, we decided it would be fun to take on the forever-rumored app for the dining halls.”
By the time they returned to campus for their upper year, Tang and Goyal had created the initial version of their app, but many obstacles still stood in their way. “We got blind-sided by what could have been an app-killing surprise: Parse, the company that ran our backend server service, shut down!” Tang said. “This meant that we had to migrate our entire online database to a different server service and change all of our code to conform to this new server service.”
Even though they had a few of these logistical challenges, Goyal and Tang had their first edition of the app available on the app store by the end of spring term in the 2015-16 school year.
The app’s creators are excited about the future of the app. Tang seemed especially enthusiastic, outlining some “slick features” that he wants to incorporate someday. “We’re hoping to add one last major features: Favorites! Users can ‘favorite’ dishes that they really like—say, Oreo Brownies—and they’ll be notified whenever one of the dining halls is serving that dish, so they can head right over to that dining hall,” Tang said.
However, both he and Goyal were interested in getting more feedback from the community on the usefulness of the app. They can’t wait to incorporate new coders’ ideas into the software. “We’re also looking for some curious young coders to pass the app on to when we graduate, the next generation! They will no doubt have their own brilliant ideas and improvements,” Tang said. “We look forward to seeing what they come up with.”