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These designs will focus on the efficiency of the server, allowing them update and create menu items with ingredients. They will also address safety issues, making sure the ingredients are labeled correctly.
Design for adding a daily special (Damian)
This UI element allows for the server/menu owner to upload a daily special to the menu. Clickable photo area allows the server to search their personal photo drive to upload a picture taken in the restaurant. Combobox of known ingredients is used to populate an ingredients listbox of known ingredient types, and a separate combobox is used to annotate substitutions. Text entry input is included for the food name and food description.
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- As the size of the ingredient list grows, the efficiency of the combobox input drops.
- Menus and forms approach used for data entry might affect the learnability of the interface
Consistent view design for adding menu items (Evan)
In this design, we try to mimic the view of the patron on the server side. This way, the server knows exactly how the menu items and ingredients will be presented to the user. A new item is created with a template, with its contents editable, and layout exactly the same as it would appear for the patron. Note that this is only a concept at this point, because we have not settled on a particular patron's design, and would have to mimic differently depending on that.
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These designs will address the safety concerns of the patron, and make the exploration of safe items accessible.
Design for searching restuarants (Damian)
Upon login to our application, the user is presented with a list of participating restaurants with specials in the area. Only daily specials are shown for each participating restaurant. A dual list box is populated in the bottom right that either shows the diet restriction itself, for example the "South Beach Diet" or the list of ingredients in the special
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- Limited ability to provided to peruse an individual restaurant menu in lieu of displaying "specials"
Menu inspection with focus on "Safety" (Damian)
From our user interviews, we assumed the two areas of focus of the application should be towards safety as the results of an incorrect menu selection could be catastrophic and accessibility for all users.
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- Menu item is not on a large display to entice user to patronize restaurant.
- Menus and forms approach might lead to learnability issues.
- No ability is provided to search for a variety of different restaurants
Random Suggestion Design (Evan)
The key focus of this design is efficiency. If a user has few/no restrictions, a random item is likely sufficient. This design also promotes exploration, because it is an easier task to decide if one likes an item than to choose from a set of items. In this design, a random menu item is generated, along with its ingredients. If the item is good, the user can settle with this item. However, if the user cannot choose this item, he can tell why such item is bad (contain restricted items from his diet, does not like chicken, etc). Based on the additional information, the interface suggests a new random item that meets these requirements. Again, the user can add more requirements, to refine the suggestions by the system.
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