Scenario and Designs

Scenario

Jess is a graduate student in the Media Lab. She often gets food from the food trucks because they are located near by. There is often a long line when she goes but that does not bother her - she spends the time organizing her thoughts and planning out the rest of her day.

She learns about GroupOrder from one of the members of her lab. GroupOrder makes it easy for people to order food. People in the same location (floor, lab, office building) place orders and one person is elected as the “runner” to pick up the food. The runner is responsible for collecting money from people, heading down to the food trucks, and bring back the food. To incentivize the runner, everyone automatically pays a little bit more for their meal as a “delivery charge”. These delivery charges are pooled together so that the runner gets their meal for free.

Jess is intrigued. She does not mind waiting in line and she would love to help out the other members of her lab. Also, while she certainly does not mind paying for her food, getting a free meal is always nice.

During lunch time, Jess opens GroupOrder on her iPhone. She notices that there are already some orders that have been placed. She add her order to the list. GroupOrder asks Jess if she is willing to be the runner. Jess says “Yes” and her name now appears on the order.

Once the timeslot closes Jess gets a notification from the application that she should collect money from her lab mates and then head down to pick up the orders. Jess walks over to the offices of the other people on the order and picks up their money. As she collects money, she marks the dish as “Paid” so she remember who has paid already.

Jess then walks down to the trucks and waits in line and places the orders. She launches GroupOrder to make sure she is ordering the right meals. After meals are ready Jess heads back up to the 5th floor lounge.

She takes out her iPhone and presses, “Food is here.” She then types “5th floor” as the location and hits send. The other people will now get a notification that their food is ready and that they should pick it up.

Designs

Design #1

Task: Placing Order

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Task: Picking a Runner

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Task: Collect Money

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Task: Place Order

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Task: Notify Eaters

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Alternate Scenarios

As a group we also explored other scenarios. We felt that the scenario shown above best encapsulated our findings from our user and task analysis. Nevertheless, we brainstormed other scenarios that we thought were also valuable. Those are included here.

Alternate Scenario 1 - "The Disconnected Floor”

Bob is a graduate student on the 7th floor of the Stata building. While he likes getting food from the food trucks because they are cheap and good quality he does not like spending the time walking over to Carleton St and waiting in line. Furthermore, once he does get his food, he always walks back to his office and eats alone while looking at pictures of cats on the Internet. Little does Bob know that there are 5 other graduate students on the 7th floor that also get food from the food trucks. They also don’t like wasting time getting food and also eat alone.

Bob happens to meet these 5 students during a social event and one of them mentions GroupOrder. With GroupOrder everyone places an order and the app will designate one of them as a “runner”. The runner will collect money from everyone, head down, pick up the food, and bring it back to a nearby location where the requester can pick up their food. Bob and his 5 friends decide to register “7th floor Stata” on GroupOrder. That way, other people can discover their group and also take advantage of the convenient delivery.

The next day, Bob enters his order in GroupOrder. GroupOrder accepts his order and asks Bob if he is willing to be a runner for the day. Bob is kind of busy so he selects, “Only if no one else is available.” After 30 minutes other people have also placed orders. Bob receives a notification from GroupOrder that David was willing to be the runner for the day and will be stopping by to pick up the money. Bob is on his way to a meeting so he catches David in the hallway to give him the money.

After the meeting, Bob is working in his office trying to figure out why his code is segfaulting. He receives a notification from GroupOrder that David has his meal in the 7th floor lounge area. Bob walks over and notices that his 5 friends are also there to picking up their food. Since they are already there, they all decide they might as well have lunch together. They all eat together in the lounge area instead of all eating by themselves in their offices. They have a wonderful time talking and enjoying their great food before having to return to their busy day.

Alternate Scenario 2 - "The Meeting"

Bob is a busy graduate student in the Media Lab. He likes grabbing food from the food trucks because it is close by and the food is good and not too expensive. However, he often has meetings around noon that run late. By the time these meetings wrap up his favorite food truck is out of the disk that he likes. This makes Bob sad.
Then Bob learned about GroupOrder. It allows him to place an order and someone else in his lab will get the food for him. All he needs to do is place his order and GroupOrder will have a “runner” from Bob’s lab head down and pick up the food.

Before his lunch meeting, Bob launches GroupOrder on his iPhone and places his order for the 12:30 pickup time slot. When doing so, he notices that Jeff (one of his close friends) has already queued up an order for a dish that Bob has never had before. Bob trusts Jeff’s tastes and would like to try something new instead of getting the same meal everyday. He taps the “+1” button to get the same thing as Jeff.

GroupOrder, also displays who will the be “runner” for the order - the person that will walk down to pick up the other orders. Typically GroupOrder, will tell the runner to collect the money for people’s meals once the time slot closes. However, at that time Bob will be in a meeting. Therefore, on this way to the meeting, Bob stops by the runner’s office to hand him the cash. Today the runner is Chris. Chris takes the money for Bob’s meal and marks it as “collected” in GroupOrder so he remembers who has given him money. Bob has no problem giving Chris money because Chris is not some random stranger - him and Bob know each other well.

Bob then goes to his meeting. During the meeting his iPhone buzzes with an notification that his meal is ready to be picked up from Chris’ office. However, he ignores the notification and continues with this meeting.

After the meeting, Bob stops by Chris’ office and picks up his favorite dish.