Ordering food ... online

I don’t eat pizza often, let alone place orders for pizza delivery. My brother decided we would have pizza tonight so he asked me to check out Pizza Pizza’s website. Keep in mind that I seldom visit websites of fast-food establishments, simply because I mostly browse the websites of design firms and magazines for web design inspiration. So you could imagine my surprise when I found out that one could place an order for pizza through the internet.

What I find fascinating is that the interface combines some of the standard GUI elements with context specific ones as shown below.

It didn’t immediately occur to me that one could customize the pizza to have different combinations of toppings on each half of the pizza. While it took me a few seconds to realize this, the interface made sense to me eventually. You can choose to apply a topping to the left half (by selecting the left icon), the right half (by selecting the right icon), or both (by selecting the middle icon). Part of my confusion might have been because I don’t order whole pizzas on a regular basis, so it may well be the case that this interface is in fact intuitive for its target audience.

Déjà vu ... or just being lazy

For those readers of this blog who have been following my writing for more than 2 years, you may remember this entry and this entry where I promise to blog more frequently. But as my schedule was constantly changing, I could not find the time (or motivation) to write on a regular basis.

As you may recall, I had mentioned that I have been doing my practicum at a public health evaluation/IT company. The 8-month full-time work term ended at the end of August but I am staying on, indefinitely, as a part-time employee both because I very much enjoy working there and also because my work is hard to transfer to someone else.

Remember that university course I mentioned that required me to keep a regular blog? Well, because I got accepted for the practicum, I had to drop that course and take it at a later time. And coincidentally, that time happens to be now. So this time around, it looks like I will be blogging more regularly—on an average of 1 to 2 posts a week.

So stay tuned.