Morsel: flow and assumptions
Two ways in, one menu. Before you go: tap a restaurant card for its menu, or a dish for its page and then its menu. At the table: pick the place, read its menu with photos where they exist, look closer at a dish, compare two or three, decide. The study covered the second. built marks what the prototype does. to test records an assumption identified during design. The completed usability study and follow-up questions document what the first round examined and what remains open.
Home: Nearby built
Restaurant cards with a photo strip and a coverage tag, then a grid of photographed dishes near the fixed area, nearest first. "I'm at a restaurant" sits at the top, one tap away.
→ Picker · Menu · DishRestaurant picker built
"Which restaurant are you at?" Photo cards with a coverage tag, filtered as you type. No location request. Places without menu data are listed below as "Menu not added yet" and are not tappable.
→ MenuMenu built
The restaurant's sections in its order. Each row includes a photo or "No photo added yet: dish available", name, description, price and a compare toggle. Full menus have section chips and a coverage count. Partial menus explain what is missing directly before the first dish row.
→ Dish · All photosAll photos · Grid view built
Only photographed dishes, as a grid, with the count of dishes it leaves out and a link back to the full menu.
→ Dish · MenuDish built
Photos one at a time with a source label on each (Restaurant photo, Diner photo) and a counter. Then the menu's description, price, what the menu lists (labeled chips, or a sentence when it lists none of nuts, gluten, dairy or shellfish) and a one-line note that appearance can vary between visits: a photo helps picture the food but does not confirm ingredients or today's presentation.
→ Add to compare · View the full menu (or the restaurant’s dishes, for a partial menu) · BackCompare built
One to three dishes side by side, from one restaurant or several: photo or an explicit missing-photo label, name, restaurant, price, description, what the menu lists and Remove. The grid wraps to two columns on narrow phones or with larger text. Returning from a dish restores the shortlist's scroll position and focus. Nothing is ordered.
→ Dish · MenuBack and memory
- Back from a dish returns to Home, the menu or Compare at the previous scroll position, with keyboard focus on the card or row that was opened.
- The labeled tab bar (Nearby, Menu, Compare) sits over reserved space on every screen but the dish page, so content never scrolls under it. Menu opens the last restaurant, or the picker if there is none.
- The shortlist, the chosen restaurant and the current screen survive a reload. Corrupt or stale saved state falls back to Home. The case-page reset and the in-app reset clear the saved prototype session.
- Text size scales to 140%, with a three-dish compare using two columns on narrow phones or at 130% and above. Long descriptions are shortened in menu rows and shown in full on dish pages. Keyboard paths and photo-label contrast have been checked in browser review; dedicated screen-reader and systematic physical-device checks remain.
Questions recorded before the study
| Assumption | Where it lives | What would change if it fails |
|---|---|---|
| People at a table want to see the dishes on the menu in front of them to test | The whole direction. It comes from my own frustration, not from research. | The product premise. |
| Browsing nearby photos is how people find a place, and it should lead into the menu rather than stand alone | Home | Whether Home is a feed or just the picker. |
| Menu order with visible gaps beats a photos-first order | Menu; missing-photo rows | The default view, and how the Photos view is framed. |
| "No photo yet" reads as missing information, not as "not available" | Menu rows, dish page | The placeholder wording. |
| A source label changes how much a photo is trusted, and diner photos are still wanted | Dish photo strip, thumbnails | Whether diner photos are shown by default. |
| Two or three dishes are enough to decide between | Compare limit | The shortlist size, or whether compare is needed at all. |
| People do not read a photo as proof of ingredients or portion | The photo note on the dish page | How prominent the note is. |
The study addressed the menu, missing-photo, source-label, compare and photo-note rows within its conditions. The first row, whether people at a table want this, and the Home row, that browsing nearby photos is how people find a place, were not tested in either round.
Supporting notes from the design and prototype review. Restaurants, menus and photos are fictional sample data.