Make Your Own Pizza
The Itinerary
The idea was to make a pizza ordering application in Flash for use on pizzeria websites. The application would instantly animate the pizza being made as the user decides to add and remove toppings.
The Journey
Flash lends itself perfectly to making pizzas. Each topping is its own symbol and all types of the same topping are on an individual layer, thereby reducing file size.
After creating a majority of the toppings, it became evident that there would also have to be certain types of pizzas in case the user didn’t want to select every topping for a particular pizza. This also allows the pizzeria to feature their signature pizza products. The UI component for selecting toppings is the checkbox since the user can select all, none or some of the toppings. The UI component for the pizzas however, would have a radio button since the user can’t have both a veggie and meat lover’s pizza. Once a pizza radio button is selected, it essentially erases all toppings currently on the pizza and builds the new one from scratch. After this, the user can add or remove toppings via the topping checkboxes as she pleases. The interface also makes some assumptions, like assuming the user automatically will want cheese. If this isn’t the case, there is a “no cheese” option in the toppings section.
The Destination
The “Make Your Own Pizza” application turned out to be a fun interface for ordering pizzas online, specifically ordering what type of pizza you’d like. Try it out at below.
http://www.nerdcereal.com/pizza
Future additions to the application include different sauces, different sizes, a price display, a half and half option and of course, more toppings and more pizzas.