In the early stages of the mobile experience design we came to a key junction, where we needed to decide between a cascading list style of menu or something else entirely. The cascading list had become very popular in food deliver applications and thus seemed like a safe choice in repeating that pattern. However during this discovery phase I had come across a hole in the wall cafe that had implemented an iPad to supplement its ability to take orders that used a cascading list menu style. During my morning commutes I was factoring time to observe these users, what I found was that one of two things would usually occur for new users:

• Users would select a coffee type and milk but would get confused as to why they couldn’t add to cart, this was due the fact that they had not made all required selections which needed to be scrolled into view by them.
  
  

• Users would know to scroll the view but would get struck with decision paralysis due to some coffee types requiring more selections than others. The ordering sequence would not be obvious for them, thus making this process slower than ordering verbally.

With more of our own testing we ultimately had opted for a ordering process that incorporated progressive reveal into its flow. This option allowed us mimic the process of ordering verbally where the process is usually broken into four parts, coffee type, coffee strength, milk type & an additional preference (sugar, extra hot etc). While a cascading list menu is usable across different hospitality types, in our specific case it was not the optimal solution.