Why the hype?

I’ve been looking more and more around myself, looking for interesting things. Some of them amaze me, some bore me and others sadden me.

This is not something I have done for long. Fred got me into this “experience” thing. Working (and having dinner almost daily, and shopping, and getting bored) with a design and experience addict taught me a sense I never knew I had: minding small details. Now I find myself observing instead of just looking. Often I take a second, deeper look at things, think about them, and sometimes take pictures of things like weird messages, great interfaces or poorly-designed objects.

Today, to start off this series, I have a picture of an eating place on a mall that got me confused for an instant:

Where do I put the parenthesis? Does this mean that I should:

a) choose a juice OR a soup - and have the dessert in both cases: (Juice OR Soup) AND Dessert;

b) pick either juice OR the soup and the dessert: Juice OR (Soup AND Dessert)?

Although the former seems more likely to be the correct answer, to me always having a dessert seems as odd as having to choose between “just juice” and “soup and dessert”.

There’s a solution to this ambiguity through design: breaking the sentence into two lines would make it much easier to tell what the choices here really are.