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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.
, 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.
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Design Selection: Search Bar
Anand arrives at Cinderella’s. Anand goes to menu.io and sees the search bar to find restaurants. He types in “Cinderella” because he does not feel like searching for the apostrophe on his mobile keyboard. Once he types in Cinderella, he is presented with a list of options. Because he is at Cindrella’s he picks it and not the other option of Cindrella Louveaunt, the French restaurant in Dorchester, MA. He is then presented with Cinderella’s main page with the menu attached to the bottom of page with several categories.
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Design Selection: Checkbox approach
Anand wants to pick pastas that are vegetariantry some new food at Cinderalla's. Today, he's in the mood for vegetarian pastas. He scrolls down to the menu, and sees the filter button. He clicks on the filter button and is presented with a standard checkbox filter. The checkbox filter has two different kinds of filters to be applied: ingredient-specific and item-specific. Because he wants be presented with vegetarian options, he checks the vegetarian box. Next, he wants only pastas to appear. Currently, the item-specific box is checked All so all items appear. He unchecks All, and then checks Pasta-only, so only pasta’s appear. Then, he hits the back button, and return to the menu.
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Task 1: Selecting a Restaurant
Design Selection: GPS
Anand arrives at Cinderella’s and As soon as Anand opens up menu.io in order to see the menu. The , the app presents him with 3 different options: Cinderella’s, Toscanini’s, and Desi Dhaba. These options are found through the GPS feature of Anand’s phone. These are the closest restaurants that use menu.io, based on Anand’s current location. He Anand sees that if he wanted to explore another restaurant's menu, he could press the "Choose another restaurant" button. Anand selects Cinderella’s, and sits down to view the menu that the app has generated for him.
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The app presents Anand with a row of icons at the top of the screen. He can scroll back and forth between items and the center item is reflected in a larger detail view in the center of the screen. He is able to see a picture of the item along with price, details, and ingredients. Anand really likes that he is able to see up close what he wants to eat, because he is feeling hungry so he skips over all of the options which look like a small portion. Presented with all this information, Anand is able to make a much more educated choice about what he wants to eat.
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Design Section: Drag filters to menu
Anand wants to filter the menu to only show vegetarian dishes, because he is vegetarianis a vegetarian, and is usually frustrated that he has to scroll through all of the pastas to find the vegetarian ones. He decides to use the filters provided by menu.io. The filters are shown on the bottom of the screen, and he drags the vegetarian filter onto his menu view, and all of the non-vegetarian dishes disappear. He also knows he wants to eat pasta, so he drags the pasta filter onto his menu. If Anand ever wishes to remove one of the filters he has placed on his menu, he could click the corresponding filter on a new dialog that has opened on the top of the screen.
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Anand is in the mood for pasta, so he drags the circular icons around the stage until the pasta icon is displayed. He touches the center stage (he could also touch the bottom label) to bring up the pasta sub-menu. Anand uses the scroll wheel to scroll through the items until he reaches mushroom ravioli. He thinks that sounds pretty good, so he drags the ravioli on the center stage to the basket in the upper right-hand corner. Anand keeps looking through the pasta items, and also decides to drag the fettuccine alfredo to the basket to compare later. He then clicks on the basket to compare his selections.
Learnability: The scroll wheel is not a common interface, but it is common enough that it would be recognizable. It also follows a modified-Lazy Susan metaphor which might help some users.
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Design selection: Comparison grid/table
Anand clicks After clicking on the basket to compare his options. He , Anand is greeted by a screen with a large stage in the middle with three places to drop entrees. His choices (mushroom ravioli and fettuccine alfredo) are sitting at the top of the stage. He sees that if he decides he doesn’t want a dish he can always drag it into the trashcan in the upper right-hand corner to remove it from his basket. He also sees that if he wants to keep searching the menu he can click the menu button in the upper left-hand corner.
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