Slim by Design App, Phase 2

*** Project Team Complete ***

Client

Paul Cashman
Email: pcashman21@verizon.net

The client is Senior Software Engineer for an under-the-radar FinTech startup and longtime Cornell alumni volunteer.

Advisor

Brian Wansink, Professor of Applied Economics & Management
Email: bcw28@cornell.edu

Student contact

Huang Hsuan <hhsuan0802@gmail.com> is setting up a team for this project. If you are interested in joining the team, please contact him.

Background

The project is an iOS app for Slim by Design, a nonprofit company run by Professor Brian Wansink and is based on his research at the Food & Brand Lab in the Dyson School at CALS. During fall 2016, a team under Professor Leshed worked on Phase 1 of this app. They made very good progress, but as always with app development there is more to be done.

Phase I of the app as currently constituted enables consumers to rate restaurants according to a ten-point questionnaire developed by Professor. Wansink. This is designed to show the extent to which the restaurant creates an environment for healthy eating. Most people think of healthy eating as meaning "go for the salad instead of the barbecued brisket platter," but the Slim by Design philosophy says that barbecue restaurants, to stay with this example, can still encourage healthy eating. The Phase 1 team implemented an iOS app to enable a consumer to select a restaurant (possibly using geographic search), answer the ten yes/no questions, provide some additional comments if they like, and rate the overall experience. The restaurant information is imported using a Google web service and stored in a MS SQL database accessed via Alamofire. The team made an InVision prototype and did some user testing with it.

Project Requirements

The aim of Phase 2 is to enable people to rate workplace cafeterias. The idea is that whether you are a cafeteria manager or a patron, you will fill out a brief questionnaire (~10 yes/no questions), along with info about what type of cafeteria this is (e.g., location in a workplace, hospital, school; cafeteria size (small/med/large); etc.), some qualitative questions (e.g., what one thing could the cafeteria do to encourage you to eat here again), and your rating of the overall experience (e.g., zero to five stars). What you get back is (a) how your answers compare with people who have rated this place, and (b) how this place compares against all other rated places of a similar nature (e.g., medium-size hospital cafeterias).

A key aspect of this app is that it should help people to understand how to eat health meals, and in particular, what visual and environmental cues nudge us into eating health meals (or not). So the questions would have links for additional information, which might be content on the Slim By Design web site, or videos or infographics that could be played/displayed in the app.

The app would enable a cafeteria manager to compare how that cafeteria compares with others, more as a means of raising the cafeteria managers's awareness (e.g., why are these specific questions being asked in the ratings) than as a means of enabling consumer choice (which is the purpose of the Phase 1 app). This will require some careful design of the user experience and the user interface, since its purpose is a little different from the more consumer-oriented Phase I app.

Also, in Phase 2, the client requires a capability for the collected data (both restaurant and cafeteria) to be either exported for analysis, or analyzed in the app. This is because even the "consumer" data on restaurants would be useful to the managers of the individual restaurants and the executives of chain restaurant companies.

In working on Phase 2, the team could leverage the current code base, while extending its functionality. The project team will almost surely find ways that the Phase 1 app can be enhanced and this may be a significant part of the new project.