Choosing the contact to meet up with could be an autocomplete field OR selecting from a set of contact pictures ordered in frequency of meeting up. The idea is that choosing the contact will initiate some kind of handshaking to connect and exchange location details.
A simpler approach is to just enter the two points directly, with or without autocomplete. This removes the need for any automated communication between devices.
Given the two locations, either retrieved automatically or entered manually, we calculate the midpoint and retrieve nearby restaurants. Selecting a restaurant could be a list, like urbanspoon or...
... selected from a map like Google Maps. I wondered about being able to drag priority votes to candidate restaurants which would then be exchanged with your contact to work out the selection. I also wondered about showing the directions from each of the points.
If we assume that the app is communicating with the contact then we might have a propose-accept mechanism to select restaurants or a drag into priority order sort of like the Steam wish list. The simplest approach though would be not to have anything and we'd just agree on the restaurant via another channel (i.e., SMS, voice, e-mail).
A fancy way to show directions if not a map overlay would be some augmented reality approach. This is probably more flashy than functional though.
Minimal Viable Product (MVP) / First release
In my original post on Restaurant in the Middle, I listed several key assumptions. Three of them control what makes sense as an MVP here:
- The places in the middle are not all crappy
- My friends will actually agree to choose a place in the middle
- There is sufficient local restaurant data available
In order to test these assumptions, I really only need two features:
- The ability to enter two locations and calculate the midpoint between them
- The ability to show restaurants near that midpoint
Next up: Building the MVP
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