Searching for Restaurants
An alternative to Google Maps Platform.
Eating Out?
Users can now search for restaurants near them, and find the ones that offer food that best fit their nutritional goals!
How it works
To better serve their clients, personal trainers can look for restaurants near their clients serving food that fits their nutritional plans. Upon finding one, they can search for the restaurant on the app, and enter the nutritional information of the specific food item served by the restaurant.
By doing this, their clients will know exactly what to do when eating out. This works especially well if their clients are busy executives with little time to prepare their meals.
The Bigger Picture
As personal trainers and users add more nutritional information to this system, all users will be able to access an ever-greater pool of nutritional information about the restaurants around them. This makes it easier for everyone to figure out where to eat out! However, this approach does have it's limitations, which we cover here.
In our Restaurants section, we wanted to let users search for restaurants in Singapore.
We did this by making a simple pop-up that had two key elements:
A search bar that users enter the name of restaurants they are looking for into
A scrollable list containing the relevant search results
The demo below showcases the basic use of the restaurants page, where the user is searching for a restaurant and wants to look at its location. There is also a blue compass button which can be used to navigate back to the user's own location.
As can be seen in the bottom sheet, there are restaurants which the user can browse through. On the right side are two buttons. The green edit button allows the user to add a new menu item to the restaurant, if there is one that does not currently exist in the database.
The arrow button will extend the bottom sheet, and reveal the menu items currently existing in the database.
Adding new restaurants
The reason for allowing users to freely add restaurants and its food items is because we were unable to find a database online which contains restaurants, their menu, and most importantly the calories of each menu item. Therefore, we decided to have the database be created by the users themselves. The restaurants or menu items added will be accessible to all users.
Below is the demo for adding a new restaurant. Users will click the green plus button on the right which will change the theme of the map, indicating that they are now searching for restaurants to add to the app. The search is then done using Nominatim. The list of existing restaurants in the OpenStreetMaps database will then be shown. Upon adding, the user will be returned to the original map mode, where they can start adding menu items.
To get the list of restaurants to our users, we had to use a backend service in order to not only make it easier for users to add a restaurant, but also to make sure that the restaurants which are being added to the database are not fake or bad input.
An issue that we ran into was the fact that to use the Google Maps Platform, we had to sign up for a billable account that needed our credit-card information, which was something we weren't really comfortable with.
Thus, while searching for alternatives, we came across an API (Nominatim) that allowed us to query Open Street Maps; an open-source database of locations around the world.
Last updated
