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The restaurants will be chosen at random from the set of restaurants within 1 mile of the user, according to GPS. This is an acceptable way to choose the restaurants to display because the user is simply searching for a bite to eat, so he may not know what type of food he wants, but is certainly not picky. In any case, he can quickly cycle through many restaurants just by "driving down the highway." See the following storyboard to understand the game on a deeper level:
Storyboard
IMAGE 1
1) Image 1 shows the first screen a user will encounter. It has two simple options. The user can either begin to "race", or cycle through the restaurants. Otherwise, he can choose "help" to learn more about how to play and choose restaurants. In our example, our user chooses to "start race".
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5) Immediately upon selecting the restaurant he wants, a map appears which leads to the desired restaurant. In our example, the user successfully arrives at "Pour House" and enjoys his meal.
Other Information
This game will contain simple to use back buttons to guard against mistakes, missed exits, etc. It will also offer a non-game mode where the user simply drives down the road and chooses whether or not to take a given exit at his leisure. In this use, this application provides a very unique way for users to cycle through possible restaurants in the area.
Analysis
Learnability: This is the hardest part of our application. The game mode, in particular, will be hard to teach to new users. People are not yet used to searching for information like restaurants in a time-constrained or game scenario. We feel that although the learnability could be hard, this isn't a deal breaker because we expect users to enjoy our application often, so they will become "experienced users" quickly. Further, mobile games are becoming more and more popular in our society, so that aspect should be learnable to most people. Finally, the potential motivation of having coupons or other rewards for success should help keep users learning the application.
Efficiency: This application will cycle through restaurant choices quickly as the user drives down the road. Since the user does not need to call the server very often, as we will bring a lot of data down from the cloud before the game begins, this application removes the issue of having to perpetually calling the server and then finding yet a new restaurant and calling the server again. Finally, we have as few intermediate screens as possible to keep users moving through the application. Of course, an application could pull the data and display it in a large spreadsheet. This would be very efficient by uninteresting to use. As a result, this idea is efficient compared to most options, but we sacrifice optimal efficiency for the sake of user experience.
Safety: The application will have easy to use back buttons that allow a user to rectify any mistakes. Since we are using accelerometers, there is higher risk of user mistake, so these buttons are even more important. Every mistake should be rectifiable with a single touch of the screen, so this application will be safe.