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Anand is a sophomore at MIT. He is extremely studious. Anand wants to do psets, but he is hungry, so he decides to go to his favorite restaurant, Cinderella’s. When he arrives at the restaurant, he opens up menu.io on his phone.
Design 1
Motivation/Connectedness/Task Alignment of Approach: Simplicity/familiarity-driven
Design 1 was primarily meant to excel in simplicity. Taking design patterns that users were sure to have seen across varied platforms, Design 1 is the most learnable of the 3 designs. Entering text and filtering checkboxes are tasks that mobile and desktop users alike are familiar with. We also felt the grid approach was appropriate in this case because users have often seen it used on the mobile platform (either Android or iPhone), and it will make intuitive sense to use in the menu as to make it extremely learnable, and approachable in viewing the menu.
Task 1: Selecting a Restaurant
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Safety: This design is safe in that errors are recoverable. If the user selects the wrong item, he or she can close the window. The users are also few since most of the time the user knows exactly what he or she is picking because it is specified in the picture and text.
Design 2
Motivation/Connectedness/Task Alignment of Approach: Technology-driven
The idea behind Design 2 was to use technology to drive a more efficient platform. This design takes advantage of both mobile technologies, and UI patterns that appear clean and quick, mimicking the style of Apple's interfaces. Specifically, we leverage technology in detecting location - to take a slight risk in safety, but allow for efficient detection of the restaurant. We also take a risk from the menu and filtering angle to use affordances such as tags and touch-based sliders (perhaps slightly new arrivals in the mobile and web 2.0 space), to create a more efficient and understandable interface. The leap might be a bit higher in terms of learnability, but it allows us to be creative with the design approach.
Task 1: Selecting a Restaurant
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Safety: This design is fairly safe. If a wrong filter is applied, it is made obvious how to remove it, and removal of said filter is done almost instantaneously.
Design 3
Motivation/Connectedness/Task Alignment of Approach: Metaphor-driven
Design 3 is driven by exploring various metaphors for the menu interface. This design has the most potential for innovation, experimenting with interesting user models. This feature-driven design, however, has potential for losing out on learnability. We use the metaphor of grocery shopping and dining the most. The QR code scanning is somewhat like a grocery shopping metaphor, since most people scan an item to really recognize what it is. Similarly, users scan the restaurant code to select the restaurant. The Lazy Susan metaphor appears, as they view the menu, just like they see all the plates at a dining table - allowing the user the freedom to explore choices. Finally, users are able to pick what they want to compare easily, by dragging it to a basket - where they can make their final choice (this metaphor perhaps requires a higher leap), however, it also allows us to a take a more risky approach.
Task 1: Selecting a restaurant
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