Overview & Background
As a new student, it was difficult to remember where each restaurant was located. Comparing food quality and finding restaurant menus required checking multiple sources. The idea behind Ruakaa was to centralize this information and make it easier for students to access everything in one place — including seeing favorite restaurants at a glance.
Issue addressed: Students struggle with locating campus restaurants, comparing meal options, and accessing up-to-date menus from various sources. Ruakaa solves this by consolidating data and enhancing discoverability.
The motivation came from real, everyday problems faced by students:
- Navigational confusion around restaurant locations.
- Fragmented access to restaurant menus.
- Lack of personalization or ability to save favorite spots.
Development Process
We designed a simple and intuitive interface with a primary focus on showing student restaurants on a map.
The restaurant menus were fetched via public APIs, which varied greatly in format and structure. This inconsistency posed a major challenge, especially due to the lack of standardized data.
We tackled the issue using regular expressions to clean and unify the data as much as possible. Though some errors persisted occasionally, the processed data reached a mostly reliable format.
The data was fetched once per day and stored in Firebase, where it was cleaned and transformed into a consistent structure readable by the app.
Outcome
The final app provides:
- A map view of all nearby student restaurants.
- The ability to save favorite restaurants for quick access.
- A more streamlined experience for students looking for food options.
Next Steps / Future Improvements
- Add localization support (restaurants did not have support always for FI, En, Sv).
- Enable users to save their favorite meals.
- Notify users when their favorite dishes are being served.
Technologies & Tools
- Flutter / Dart
- Firebase