Giant Eagle Food Finder
Touch Screen Public Kiosk
Rapid Prototyping with Macromedia Director
A two week project to design, implement, user test,
and redesign a public kiosk of our own choosing. The purpose of
this interface was to find where items are located in a supermarket,
or if they even carry the item for which you are searching.
User testing revealed the severity and nuances of
semantics in a 'walk up and use' interface. Other interesting
insights include the mental models of heirarchies from non-computer
users versus skilled computer users.
From a programming standpoint, this design is created
with extensibility in mind. Each product listing page is created
dynamically from items in an internal database. Each object and
button type are singular objects, but operate contextually depending
on adjacent objects or labels.
As well, the shopping cart is manipulated on the
fly, storing items in a temporary database. For these reasons,
the shockwave applet is a bit more unstable than the standalone application!
Originally, the main interaction was to be map-based,
showing you how to physically find the items in question. By 'client'
request, the focus was shifted to a more web-like shopping cart
to track expenditures.
Problems of such an interface include navigating
an enormous amount of data and managing their corresponding taxonomies
in a logical fashion. |
 
Main screens provide simple instruction and visually guide the
user to the next action
'Back' as 'Up'
In user tests, having 'back' go to the last visited
page caused much confusion. More testing revealed that the best
function was to say 'back' but move 'up' in the heirarchy.
The 'Shopping List' page
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