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We initially had two radically different ideas regarding the voting system. One was very similar to how Doodle operates, with a binary voting system (the one we ended up choosing). The other was a "up-vote" "down-vote" system similar to reddit. We eventually decided to incorporate the Doodle system, as it was the most straight forward for the users. In addition, this part was the most difficult to display using our layout. During our computer prototype, we only showed two restaurant possibilities. As one of our classmates pointed out, this design wasn't feasible for scaling. In the end, we decided to implement a scrolling display. Unfortunately, this does cause a significant decrease in visibility. However, we want to give our users the most flexibility in restaurant selection (ie, not limit to only 5), and given this, a user can ultimately select all 30+ restaurants, we needed to have some sort of scrolling display. Lastly, only the organizer can see the "choose" buttons, so there is little in the way of confusion.
(insert close-up of chat/order panel)
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Because restaurant menus have such a wide range of sizes, we also had some difficulty designing how to display menus. We wanted to utilized the predetermined categories, but we were unsure how to display the menu in a way that was aesthetically pleasing with respect to the rest of our site. Eventually, we decided to do the tabs on the side of the panel, with the items on the right (with dropdown accordion for options). However, after the computer prototype we later found that we still had a size issue (and a color issue). Therefore, we changed the background to its current color (white), and added a hover background color for the items. As for the size, we also fixed this one with scroll bars for menu items and menu categories where needed.
(insert close up of bottom panel)
In addition, during paper prototyping, users were having trouble figuring out when their friends were done ordering, and many often pushed the order before their friends had finished ordering. Therefore, we decided that we needed a means to make it very visible when someone is done ordering. Therefore, we added this bottom paned with icons for each person. Initially for the computer prototype, the bar was subtle and contained all of the Facebook photos of the people in the order and grayed out text that turned white when the person finished. However, users of this prototype pointed out that there was nothing to draw their eyes down to that part of the screen, and that the change was far too subtle. Therefore, we changed it to the current red X/green checkmark.
Implementation
Evaluation
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