Design Evaluation of the StarRez Bagged Lunch ordering system

At Chestnut Residence, the dormitory I live in, the residents can order bagged lunches using a webpage.

To quote an advertisement: it tastes awful, but it works.

• It does what it needs to do
  • Allows students to order lunches two days in advance
  • Kitchen staff prepares lunches according to order

• But it does it in a horrible way

  • economy: the interface is... too economical in some places, not economical enough in others
  • Website does not look "pretty" - interface sparse, no fancy graphics
  • Yet has extra menu for next month
  • Perhaps link menu displayed to current month selected?
  • Maybe display menu in-line with the actual select-a-date table? No duplicate calendar
  • also, menus open in a new tab - perhaps open them in-line somehow so people don't have to flip back and forth between the two pages
  • Admin Login bar not necessary - admins could have separate page
  • e.g. Google Play, the Android app store, has one page for developer login and another for customers
  • Don't need user to enter student number every time - page can save student number
  • Loads full-sized menus even if user doesn't click on them
  • Slow page loads; takes up user's time
  • elegance: not intuitive as it doesn't follow existing convensions
  • Calendar is shifted - corrupt display
  • Engineering failure here - failed to test website on new browsers and fix bug
  • Confusing for people trying to order lunch for a particular day of the week
  • The clock is wrong. ?!
  • DO YOU EVEN TIMEZONE? Also, clock only updates when page refreshes
  • Can detect current user's timezone from local machine. Use it?
  • Or, since most users will be in Toronto, set the timezone to EST and stick to it
  • Probably not very confusing, as users can check their own clocks
  • Why have a clock anyways, if the users can check own clock?
  • Displays "Sandwich/2nd sandwich/deluxe sandwich" instead of the actual names of the sandwiches
  • inconvenient for the user as he/she has to look it up in the menu
  • Safety
  • Fairly good
  • Days where lunch cannot be ordered are greyed out
  • so people won't go hungry because they incorrectly believed they ordered lunch
  • Confirms that one entered the correct student ID by showing one other information about oneself
  • Clear green (visual cue) that lunch was ordered
  • (The lack of indication in the list at the bottom is confusing though)
  • Should help student order meals on a schedule
    • Too easy to miss a lunch day
    • Perhaps let students repeat an order for a few weeks?
  • Resilience
  • Page has 8 errors on W3C Validator
  • http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.89chestnutlunchbag.info%2Flunchbag%2Findex.php&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0
  • Browsers do not render the HTML correctly
  • Already we can see error in rendering calendar
  • See rendering with Internet Explorer vs Chrome:
  • Issue as many students are likely to be running Chrome/Firefox as they are more tech-savvy

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