...
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, selects Cinderella’s on the application and sits at a windowside booth. Meanwhile, he begins to view the menu. Anand is vegetarian so he filters the menu such that only vegetarian items are displayed. He is craving pasta so he also filters his menu to show only pasta dishes. Anand begins to look through his filtered menu. He clicks on some dishes that look appealing to see the pictures at a close up. He is very health-conscious so he wants to view the ingredients of a couple of dishes. He decides on mushroom ravioli and calls over the waiter to make his order. Satisfied, Anand closes menu.io and starts to read his New York Times app as he waits for the food to arrive.
Design 1
Task 1: Selecting a Restaurant
Motivation: 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.
Task 1: Selecting a Restaurant
Design Selection: Search Bar
...
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: 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.
Task 1: Selecting a Restaurant
...
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: 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.
Task 1: Selecting a restaurant
...