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Friday, September 25, 2015


All hail your newest solution for all your supper woes!

The idea of Orderlyst came as a surprise to me. My group had spent our first meeting discussing about some ideas we had had, but after an email to Yang Shun we found that none of the proposed ideas were a good fit for the assignment. A weekend later, we met up again - but I was late because of a linguistics class that involved equations for interactional discourse (my brain almost died), and the guys introduced the idea. Having had experience staying on campus, I could understand the problem sans problem and voilà - we set forth with Orderlyst. 

If we have any pun seekers out there - don't smile to yourself. That's weird. If we have any confused friends - let me explain. Orderlyst is a order collation tool that aims to facilitate quick and painless food ordering in a group setting. Orderlyst is an order list; we want you to place orders on an order list orderly. If anyone is struggling with the induced pain, please remember why you are on my blog in the first place; at least I'm still yivolving (bad smile)

I always have the most suitable teammates for each project, and that's totally cool. I loved working with my mates (Hi Nathan, Louis & Sam!) for this assignment. I don't know how or what the other designers do, but I always feel bad because I find that I don't contribute as much as my teammates. While they sustain coffee and food, they have minimal sleep. Meanwhile, I'm either staring into space or knocked out on my bed while they tirelessly code into the night.

I do put in a lot of effort and time for what I do - the branding, the UI/UX and the graphics mostly - but I have a slightly unnerving expectation of myself and end up overthinking and expending much more time than what I think I should be affording. Wireframing this time was less stressful since we had discussed the flow of the app, but I spent most of the time in Penang (over the election weekend, hehehe) brainstorming and researching on logos. It was always on my mind and I always quickly sketched my ideas out, but there were so many and there were branching out towards all directions.


Eventually, as the vacation ended, I came up with something I thought was nice and handy (hahaha because it was literally hands on the logo). I liked it and settled for that because of what I would like it to symbolize - helping each other out both ways. About 3 days before the submission date, I decided to pull it out and we implemented a new logo. The new one is very in-your-face; it is a list. If you have great imagination (like Nathan!) you can also see 3 people - a group! Plus it looks great with our text logo. I'm very satisfied with the whole look and colour of our brand (big smile)

Our UI/UX is not my work; it is the effort of the team. I'm very thankful for all the feedback and suggestions, which are really helpful for me to see the app from a different perspective instead of my usual slant. Sometimes to test the app as a user myself gets muddy because I already have expectations on certain aspects. Elements that I envision may not come out as imagined as well. With the help of my teammates, we've come up with the cool feature of creating actions with simple touches - like adding an existing order item of your friend to your own user order just with a swipe and a tap. It's one of my favourite things about the app.

Ok so - what exactly is Orderlyst? 

As students staying on campus, we found out that there was a persisting problem when it came to ordering supper. User orders from friends flew to the heroic orderer - the one who is willing to shoulder all user orders to make the supper order - from everywhere and from all avenues. We have friends who message, friends who call, friends who verbally let you know of what they want. As the orderer, can you remember these easily and make the order without missing out or making mistakes on any item? 

With Orderlyst you can forget those troubles, because all your friends will be on our platform, where we'll help you keep them in the loop and collate everything neatly. Now you can have supper painlessly and cheaply (if you're into counting how much lower your additional surcharges go as more friends join the order). Hounding your friends for payment is so much easier as well, because with all the item prices input into the system, the individual costs for each user will be shown for them. No more excuses for being poor in calculations!

So the next time you find yourself in a situation where your group wants to make a quick takeout order - or anything you see fit, really - start using Orderlyst. Be it your colleagues, your friends, or your family, we're sure that they would love Orderlyst (biggest non-creepy smile)

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