Optimizing Campus Cafeteria Operations: Development and Usability Evaluation of the Eatsy Mobile Food Ordering System

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Technological advancement has changed the landscape of the food service industry. People nowadays place their food orders using food service applications. However, university students still need to queue up at the cafeteria to get their food. During peak hours, university students face long lines and significant delays, wasting their valuable time due to inefficient manual order management at the cafeteria. The problems affect students' satisfaction and cafeteria staff productivity. Therefore, this project aimed to address these challenges by designing a user-friendly Android mobile application food ordering system, Eatsy in the context of cafeteria at the University Teknologi MARA (UiTM) Machang Campus. The application has been developed using Rapid Application Development (RAD) methodology which involves Requirements Planning, User Design, Construction and Cutover phases to improve the dining service experience. Eatsy allows students to order food at cafeteria wherever they are, and they could track the status of their orders in real-time. This application also helps cafeteria staff managing order effectively. At the Cutover phase, a preliminary usability test with the System Usability Scale (SUS) was performed with a purposeful sample of users. The result of the evaluation showed an average of SUS score of 91.25 which is considered as very high user acceptance and system usability. Overall, the implementation of Eatsy proves to be a viable digital transformation strategy, aimed at minimizing operational delays, optimizing the service offering and enriching the dining experience at the Campus. Future research directions involve utilization of intelligent recommendation system and extension of architecture to support sustainable operation of multi-cafeteria systems.