One of the golden rules of design (and life) is give people what they want.

And what do students want? Free food of course, and Food-Bot can help. After all one of the glories of being a student is the free buffet, with people putting far more effort to get into an event with cheese on sticks than they ever did on their degree. Who can blame them though, one of the harshest trials of being a student (not that there are many trials in being a student) is realising you don’t have enough to buy food this week.

But how can Food-Bot, winner of the Smiley Award 2011, help me, I hear you cry. Well at the moment it’s only available on a very small selection of universities, and the automated system is prone to errors. But the creator, Greg Woloschyn, is open and even amused by the programming mistakes, even putting a blog on the site dedicated to Food-Bot fails.

As well as being a useful resource to a starving student this website is an excellent example of how important the product or feature behind what your designing for is. After all, anybody can sell something amazing to a market that’s straining at the leash to get their hands on it. It takes a real genius to sell something that’s inherently dull. A good example of this is the price comparison websites; they all essentially offer the same functions with only some minor differences in terms of statistics. So how do you sell something like this. Well with a really annoying commercial: that way it sticks in the customers head and then when they’re looking for car insurance that services name is right there at the top of their head.

So the next time you’re getting enraged over the latest irritating advert remember, the person who came up with it might be a lot cleverer than you (or they could be an irritating idiot, I mean who knows really).

If you need something designed then why not submit a brief on the Creative Services Exchange.