The New Concept
It was sometime in mid-January when I approached Eugene again with a new spin on the idea. Rather than providing the user with a planned itinerary for their date, we would allow them to customize their own date based on the same criteria. Furthermore, we would also focus on helping the user plan other aspects of their daily lives. Eugene liked the idea and we got together to discuss it further.
We wanted to provide users with an interactive experience, one that was both intuitive and had all of the ideas up-front. We agreed to focus initially on dating, allowing users to customize their own date or event based on their individual preferences and geographic location.
The first design we ever came up with (shown left) was terribly crude. I remember Eugene mentioning something about having dynamic content displayed with DHTML and AJAX, meanwhile, I couldn't help but think of the household cleaner.
We wanted to create an interface that was familiar and easy to understand. So, we decided on the drag and drop functionality. Users would drop selected activities into a shipping cart that would store them and display the total amount of time and money required for the date (shown right).
Now that we had our design down on paper it was time to see if it can work on the web. Hosting the site from his laptop, Eugene put together the first of many live demos of the site. Interestingly, despite all the changes and revisions, the actual design and positioning of elements remains the same today.