QuickBite

Welcome Page
Existing Requests Page
Place Order Page

Inspiration

As college students, we are constantly busy and hungry. We noticed that when the dining places on campus are closed at night, we have the urge to order takeout.

What it does

QuickBite matches users at the same location, groups their order, and splits the delivery fee among each user in the group. To support local and minority-owned businesses, we prioritized including these businesses in our dataset. In addition, we display if the business is local or minority-owned to all users.

How we built it

We used the Kivy framework to design and develop the UI. We take the user's requests, including their personal information and order details; this data is sent to the backend, where we use a MySQL database to store it. In the database, we look for a possible match to the current request (same location and restaurant). If we find a match, we sum up the order price for both users and complete the order. If we did not find a match, we would let the user know and ask them to submit a new request.

Challenges we ran into

We were limited by time and resources, so we developed a Minimal Viable Product to display our idea. For best collaboration, we chose a python-based technology called Kivy to implement our idea. We spent a significant amount of time learning the new technology. We specified the challenges we faced below.

Time stamp: we wanted to discard all requests that exist in the database for more than 10 minutes and let the user know that we didn't find a match. However, we couldn't implement this feature due to time constraints.
More matches: Ideally, we want our app to group as many users as possible to reduce the delivery fee each user has to pay; however, incorporating this feature proved to be more challenging than we assumed.
Budget tracker: Since it is easy to exceed the budget when ordering takeout, we wanted to design a feature that tracks and alarms each person's weekly spending within the app. However, this feature also proved to be time-consuming.
In-app chat: One of our goals is to foster communities by connecting people through food. Currently, the app asks for each user's contact information(phone number) for communication; however, it would be ideal to establish an in-app chat feature to make communication easier.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning a new framework that we were not familiar with to encourage collaboration and product delivery.
Building a working application within the limited time frame.
Communicating with teammates to coordinate frontend and backend to sufficiently display our ideas.
Accomplishing multiple Sponsor Challenges by promoting themes like personal finance and supporting local communities as well as minority businesses.