GR4 - Paper Prototyping
Platform and Software Specifications
Our project is an HTML5 mobile-web app that loads on a browser. It can render on any smartphone browser, though we primarily checked it on androids.
Other specifications:
Do not turn the phone sideways---the app does not resize.
The filtering (for vegetarian, gluten-free, nut-free, etc) will be done by the backend. Right now, if you click on a filter there will be feedback that you clicked it, but the actual menu items will not disappear. That's why the chicken sandwich still appears when you filter for vegetarian.
The only filter that works right now is vegetarian, for the same reason as above.
The pictures are hard-coded in; there is no database that loads pictures. The only menu uploaded is that for Flour Cafe.
Due to a new release which is still someone buggy, but enables some of our features, JQueryMobile will from time to time incorrectly display the page. If this happens, please reload the page.
We have not implemented searching for restaurants yet because that too will require an extensive back-end.
How to start the prototype:
Load the internet on your smartphone and visit: http://aidsorc.org/compprot
When it loads, choose Flour Cafe to explore their menu. Because only the lunch options would be affected by the vegetarian tag, the feedback for filtering for vegetarian only appears on the lunch page (so don't be alarmed if you don't see any feedback on the dessert page, for example).
Reflections:
This project imposed a whole new set of constraints on our original paper prototype. We did an additional round of testing on our paper prototype and found that people were open to several layouts. We had concluded after our second iteration of paper prototyping that people would want multiple food icons on the top of the screen and entree details in the center. But in a third iteration of paper prototyping, we just had one huge picture which would take up the entire screen, and people liked that as well. They especially liked the idea of having big pictures so they could see the details of the menu items. We ultimately decided to go with the second option because we felt it would be the best use of our screen real estate. The original icons would have clouded up the screen, and one of the main purposes of our app is to give customers a realistic view of what they are eating. We want this picture to be as large as possible, and because mobile screens are so small, we decide to make this picture the main stage.