Food App Design Project: An Online Food Ordering Application

Desklib provides past papers and solved assignments for students. This project focuses on the design and development of a food ordering app.

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Abstract – The aim of this design project is to create an application for Food App restaurant.
it was designed to avail food order services to the customers of the Food App restaurant. An
online application was created using the IDE framework. To create this project Jakob Nielsen
heuristics principles were used. A complete working food application was developed using
design principles and codes. The prototype of this application is recommended to the Food
App restaurant. Future enhancement can be done in the field of security measures to make the
application more secure and authenticated (Hartman, Rokitta & Peake, 2013).
1. Introduction – The application is developed to provide online services to the Food App
restaurant customers. Using this application, the users can view menu items, they can add
items to cart, and place an order for the same. This project is similar to such kind of
applications that avail the same services such as, Urbanspoon. But, Urbanspoon is
somewhat different from Food App, as it provides a rating of different restaurants and
reviews of customers along with food critics. It helps the customers to find the local food
very easily. All the food applications to perform the same kind of tasks but vary in few
activities. But they have to be interactive and responsive to the customers. It should fulfill
the customer requirements (Sularto & Yunitasari, 2015).
2. Interface Designs Reflection
a. UID (User Interface Design) of Food App:
The user-friendliness and usability functioning have been kept on priority while designing
this application. It has been considered as a quality food app that consists of every
possible function that a food app must have. The order status page satisfies the first
principle of usability heuristics that says the system must inform its users about the
processing status of the app. Every page of the Food App used simple language that is
understood by the user. It easily connects the real world and the system with its language
(Park & Song, 2015). Each page has an “emergency exit” that satisfies the user control
heuristics principle. Edit cart, Terms and Conditions, and Notifications page are
consistent and standardized i.e. each situation, word and action have the same meaning
and does not create confusion. The registration page, payment page needs to be error
resistant. The Food App also satisfies this principle by keeping the pages error-free. The
food menu page and the left menu tab consists of every possible page that the user may
find here only. The user does not find any difficulty in finding any page in this
application, thus, satisfies the next heuristic principle of recognition. The entire
application is user-friendly and easy to understand. It can be easily understood and used
by an experienced as well as inexperienced user, thus again satisfies one of the principles
i.e., efficiency and flexibility of use. The pages that contain information like ‘Terms and
Conditions’ and ‘individual food item’ are not filled with irrelevant content which is
rarely needed. Only relevant content is placed in these pages, thus, satisfies the
minimalistic design principle also. Registration page, login page, and payment page help
the user for error recovery. If a user had done any mistake in any of these pages, then he
can easily recover from such errors because error messages are clear and precise, the
Diagnose from error principle is also satisfied here. When users use the application for

the first time, they were guided by the proper documentation that helps them in
understanding the flow of the app (Han, tom Dieck & Jung, 2018).
b. How does user requirements are met by the design and enhancing the user
experience?
The user of the “Food App” application has some requirements from the same, like, first
of the user must book a table by entering his/her name, total persons and table number in
the required fields. Then register (login, if already registered) himself/herself in the
application to avail the services offered by the application. after that user should be able
to view the food menu on the home page. Each menu item must have a link to another
page that contains furthermore related items with their price and description. The users
should be able to select food items of their choice to add it to the cart (can remove if
needed). If he/she needs more than one order than more orders can be added to the cart.
Once orders are added to the cart the user is able to edit the orders present in the cart by
adding more of them or removing any order from them. When the user is sure of the
orders, he can confirm the order by clicking on the checkout button. This will take the
user to a payment page that needs some payment credentials to be filled by the user in
order to make an online payment. Once the payment is done, the status of the placed order
can be viewed in the order status page. This page ensures the visibility of the system
status or processes is maintained. The user can even select a discount offer related to his
payment method. The Food App maintained the consistency of user’s requirements
throughout. It also justifies the user-friendly interface and ensures that the user experience
is better (Preece, Rogers, & Sharp, 2015). Figure 1, is an example of user experience that
the Food App provides to its users.
c. What factors are there that influenced the design and why?
There are several factors including the user requirements that influenced application design.
The user had few requirements such as there should be a menu page that consists of different
menus, the registration page should be followed by a table booking page. The payment page
should allow different payment services to the customers, the system status should be visible
to the users, and few more requirements are also there. While developing the application few
issues which are faced such as creating a payment gateway for performing an online
transaction. While creating the database few problems were aroused which were solved
afterward. Jakob Nielsen heuristics principles were used for implementing the design for the
Food App application. All the principles have been followed properly for designing the
application. Few principles like error prevention and control, system status visibility, user
control, consistency, flexibility, recovery from error, etc. these principles helped in
maintaining user interaction with smooth usability interface. The area to communicate with
customers is increasing as the organization is shifting from offline to online. It is accessing
the advantages of being online to provide services to its customers. The business has a
requirement of increasing the area of its services through which they can provide online food
to the customers at their doorsteps (Hasan, 2016). They also required that the customers shall
be able to make online payment of their own choices like PayPal, debit and credit cards as
mentioned in Figure 2. The competitor i.e. Urbanspoon has been discussed in the above
section. The design ideas have been taken from this application which is very good in its
services and interface.
d. Discussion of similar interfaces:

The Food App provides an interface that is user-friendly and interactive in addition to it the
application was easy to understand. Urbanspoon, UberEats, OpenTable, etc., are the
applications that have been compared with our application. These applications facilitate the
same services like ours, see Figure 3, here Urbanspoon has been evaluated for comparison as
depicted in Figure 4. The home page that lists menu items is similar in both the applications.
Menu items are listed accordingly as the other app maintains. Few guidelines and ideas have
been taken from Urbanspoon while designing the application. the idea of the layout for the
Food App application has been taken from Urbanspoon. Every page in our application is
having a back button to safely move to the previous page without any hustle. Some features
of the design are there in our application which we found better in Food App like, search tab
to search anything within the application. the search feature is not present in Urbanspoon. But
Urbanspoon is an application that consists of the database of several restaurants. It provides
reviews and critics for the restaurants and allows customers to find food nearby. These
features are missing in our application because Food App is a dedicated application for a
single organization (Jin, et al. 2017).
3. Conclusion
This report has been created to evaluate the design of the Food App application. the Food
App is a mobile application of an organization that provides food services to their online
customers. Various food applications have been evaluated to check the similarity and
differences in the facilities provided by these applications. Usability principles have been
discussed in this report that influenced us while creating the design of the project. Various
factors have also been discussed that influenced our design (Jiang, et al. 2016).
Below are the discussed Figures:
Figure 1: Order status page

Figure 2: Payment options available in the Food App application
Figure 3: Menu page in Food App application

Figure 4: Menu Page in Urbanspoon application

References
Hartman, R., Rokitta, C., & Peake, M.D. (2013). Oracle application express for web
applications [electronic resource]. Springer.
Sularto, L., & Yunitasari, T. (2015). User requirements analysis for restaurant POS and
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Sciences, 169, 266-280.
Park, H., & Song, H. D. (2015). Make e-learning effortless! Impact of a redesigned user
interface on usability through the application of an affordance design approach. Journal of
Educational Technology & Society, 18(3), 185.
Han, D. I., tom Dieck, M. C., & Jung, T. (2018). User experience model for augmented
reality applications in urban heritage tourism. Journal of Heritage Tourism, 13(1), 46-61.
Preece, J., Rogers, Y., & Sharp, H. (2015). Interaction design: beyond human-computer
interaction. John Wiley & Sons.
Hasan, B. (2016). Perceived irritation in online shopping: The impact of website design
characteristics. Computers in Human Behavior, 54, 224-230.
Jin, R. K. X., Morgenstern, J., Bowers, N., & Gao, N. (2017). U.S. Patent No. 9,582,807.
Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Jiang, Z., Wang, W., Tan, B. C., & Yu, J. (2016). The determinants and impacts of aesthetics
in users’ first interaction with websites. Journal of Management Information Systems, 33(1),
229-259.