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When the food arrives, she hits the button and everyone gets another email "Katie says the food's here. Hope you are still hungr-y". Everybody comes over, pays up, and enjoys the deliciosu Thai food. They are real happy and full.
Designs
Design 1:
- First, Katie needs to invite friends to an order. She can do so by searching through her Facebook friends via dropdown menu or by typing in an e-mail address of the desired person. If desired, she can choose a restaurant or type of restaurant from the searchable drop down list of restaurants in her area. In this case, she chooses “Thai food”. She can also optionally add a message to send along with the invitation. She can view the people she's added in the “friends invited” box on the right side of the screen.
- Next, she is directed to the page to choose a restaurant. Upon accepting the invitation, her friends can also view this screen, and their current status will be displayed in user info tab on the left. This will show what friends are currently viewing the page, which haven't responded yet, and those who declined. Tim really doesn't want Mexican food tonight, so he filters out Mexican restaurants. Janet wants Thai food as well, so she also selects restaurants with Thai food, and the multiplier next to Thai food is increased to show that multiple people favor this option. As Katie and her friends are offering up suggestions about food, a list of constraints is displayed on the right. Once everyone has agreed on a restaurant, they can select that restaurant as their current restaurant (option on list of restaurants) and proceed to order.
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Errors: Users will have the option to delete items that they don't want from their order, as well as the option to back out entirely. Essentially, one can undo any action up until the time that the order is submitted. If this design goes without a chat box entirely, the users may run into a communication issue if the interface doesn't take into account every desired communication. For example, Janet could have ordered half the duck, but Tim could have clicked the “other half” button first, leaving Todd still wanting to share the duck. In this model, without the chat box, there would be no way for Todd to communicate to Tim that he specifically wanted to share the duck with Janet (ie optimizing food order could be tricky).