The participant
Chooses what to order and needs to understand their share of the final cost.
← Selected work
Akila / Personal project
A shared order, followed through to repayment.
A personal prototype exploring the coordination behind a shared office order: choices, cutoffs, costs and repayments.
Personal prototypeNot used in a live workplace
Ordering together brings a series of small decisions: where to order, what everyone wants, when the list is final and who will pay. The coordination continues after the food arrives, when people need to settle their share.
Akila started with a problem I experienced. My original brief connected these steps through small groups, timed ordering sessions, a consolidated list for the organizer and repayment records.
- Open a group session
- Collect choices before the cutoff
- Consolidate the order
- Organizer calls the restaurant
- Confirm costs and payer
- Keep track of repayments
Simplified proposed workflow from the original brief. It is not a verified map of the current implementation.
Who the experience is for.
The organizer
Brings choices together, closes the list and places the order.
The payer
Covers the group payment and needs a clear record of outstanding repayments.
01 / Scope
Start with one group and one order.
The first useful story is a single restaurant order within a circle of colleagues. A shared cutoff makes it possible to move from collecting choices to placing an order.
The brief also explored scheduled office errands, drinks and restaurant partnerships. Those remain extensions of the idea; the core coordination problem deserves to be understood first.
02 / Decisions
The details become the product.
A default meal for a late participant raises a consent question: joining a circle should not automatically commit someone to an order. Shared delivery costs need an understandable allocation rule.
Repayment also has more than one state. A participant reporting that they paid is different from the payer confirming receipt. These are design questions I would resolve when reviewing the next iteration, rather than assume the prototype already handles.
03 / Current state
A prototype, with questions still open.
Akila has not been used in a live workplace. The documented brief supports the problem framing and proposed workflow; the current implementation still needs a focused review before I describe its architecture or feature completeness.
Whether the experience saves time, whether colleagues keep using it and whether a company would pay remain untested. The next useful step is to review one complete flow, then address specific weaknesses before considering a broader rebuild.