GR2 - Designs
Scenario
| Panel |
|---|
Frodo walks around in the busy streets of Boston site-seeing, and decides that he's starting to get hungry. He pulls out his newly bought Iphone and starts searching for restaurants to eat at. |
...
He begins to examine their menus through his mobile device. After deciding on choosing restaurant A, he finds directions to the restaurant, and eventually commutes to his restaurant of choice when he becomes hungry enough. |
Storyboard Designs
Design 1:
Design 1 focuses on providing data to an user for they can better decide what restaurant to choose from. The overall purpose of the application is to provide a canvas for the user to eliminate choices to help them narrow down places to eat in a relatively close distance. Starting with more choices, our goal is to provide the user with enough information to narrow a choice from many different restaurants into eventually 1. As we progress to less choices, more and more information will be provided such as detailed reviews and full menus. The idea behind this approach is that users do not needed a lot of information to narrow down initial choices, but as the choices become more difficult, the application provides them with more information to make a better informed decision.
Storyboard
Initially, the display shows four restaurants in their nearby surroundings with limited information about each restaurant - a name, general rating, distance, and a few menu options. From these choices, the one that seems least appealing can be swiped off, producing another query result. If at any point the user swipes two options off the screen at the same time, the resulting comparison will only look at the remaining two options. Another method is to slide two different restaurants into one other, announcing that the user wants to compare those particular two restaurants.
...
Once a choice has been made, the application displays a step by step directional map to guide the user to their designation. This page will be displayed with other information about the restaurant, such as phone number, the entire menu, as well as photos of the establishment. 
Other Information
This application will contain simple to use back buttons to guard against mistakes and changed decisions. Another feature that will be involved a more traditional sort to limit the type of restaurants that are displayed such as type, price, and rating. This feature will be a part of the middle, MenuMe button.
Analysis
Learnability: Elimination is a common technique for making choices. Given a certain set of decisions, a person initial instinct is to quickly get rid of choices that are not appealing. Learnability for this particular app follows the same idea. As a user eliminates choices for a restaurant, he can just "wipe" it off the screen. This motion is used throughout the entirety of the experience. As a result, the interaction with our interface is an intuitive way for users to eliminate choices consistant with the way they perform a similar task otherwise.
...
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.