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hungr

Group Members

• Donald Guy
• Vincent Lee
• Sarah Lehmann
• Chris Merrill
• Wiki MarkupTA: \[Insert TA Here\]TA: Tsung-Hsiang (Sean) Chang

Problem Statement

Currently, MIT has two mailing lists that are used to publish the availability of free food or free items that they don't need anymore (but that others might).  These mailing lists (free-food and reuse) are useful for these purposes, but it is often difficult to determine salient information regarding which posts are near you, or to decode whether these posts contain what you want (as the subject line is only sometimes useful).

Facets of the current setup that are problematic include:

1. It is difficult to determine the geographic relevance of free-food or reuse emails.
2. It is often difficult to determine the content of the posts without extensive searching.
3. It is hard to tell if a food post has been claimed by other people.
4. There doesn't exist a predictive model to help people looking for free food or items determine the most likely locations and times for free item posts.

Target Users

1. Posters
   1.  Motivation is to get rid of cruft or food quickly due to circumstances (e.g. "We don't have the Bush Room reserved past 10!")
   2.  
2. Casual reusers
   1. Incentive to use is to acquire specific items or classes of items
   2. Searches for items
3. Competitive reusers
   1. Incentive to use is to get an edge on competition by getting served metadata in at-a-glance form
   2. Looks at live-updating, general map
   3. Uses type tagging
   4. Needs lots of efficiency

Online ordering has already simplified the problem of placing orders for delivery. However, often it is difficult to effectively organize a group of people to place an online order for food. First, one has to go through the task of finding people, which, in a hectic place like MIT, can be difficult. Then, if the organizer hasn't yet decided on a restaurant, the group needs to argue over which of many restaurants from which they would like to order food. Finally, the group needs to congregate around one computer to compile the order. In worst case, it consists of each person in turn browsing the menu for the restaurant on that one computer and then finally selecting a desired food.

Therefore, we seek to provide a means to make online ordering a more social experience. In doing so, we will facilitate the process of finding friends to order food with and selecting a restaurant. In addition, we will effectively parallelize the process of actually ordering food, thus improving efficiencyAll of the above groups exist in a community which is relatively proficient in computer technology.

Proposed Solution

Let's not get ahead of ourselves there, pardner.

GR1 - Task Analysis

GR2 - Designs

GR3 - Paper Prototyping

GR4 - Computer Prototype

GR6 - User Testing