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The home page is where parents can search for meals by ingredient or by what a certain child likes.
The search bar accepts ingredients from a list (based on the limited number of recipes in our database), or from clicking on one of the children tiles. Hovering over the Max tile prompts the user to “Search for max’s likes”, something we added after doing heuristic evaluations, because not all users found it intuitive that the tiles could be clicked on. We felt adding the tool tip was an elegant way to signal this capability to the users without having to add an extra button.
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Taste Twister is built using Django, a Python web framework and is hosted on Heroku. Our project depends heavily on the templating and url routing features of feature of the framework. Our backend generates all the HTML for our pages. On the frontend, Taste Twister replies on the jQuery library and canvas element for user interactions. We used Twitter Bootstrap for scaffolding and plugins like modals. While Bootstrap was an important tool for us, we tried to avoid using to many visual elements from it and opted to style things with custom CSS.
Data was collected through web scraping. Currently, all of our data is in local text files that we write and read to. This made it quick to develop and modify data, but causes a few usability problems. For example, there is a slight delay when searching for several ingredients. Because of the lack of a database our search functionality does no perform as well as it could.
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The parents were given the briefing and tasks in the form of an online document, which they read before beginning the tasks.
The children were given their briefing in an informal manner before completing their task. We did not expect them to remember everything we read to them, and made sure to ask if they had any questions before proceeding.
Briefings For parents
Hello, you are testing Taste Twister, a web application designed to help parents plan meals for their kids.
As kids, we know we made our parents suffer as they tried to plan meals for us and our siblings. Kids can be picky eaters, and siblings often don’t agree on foods. Parents have a difficult time remembering what their kids like, and end up cooking the same dishes over and over. We want to make it easier for parents to find new meals to cook that their kids will actually like. Taste Twister makes the entire process of choosing meals based on what kids like fun and interactive for parents and kids.
You’ll greatly help us if you talk through your thought process as you complete the tasks and let us know if you have any additional feedback.
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Cook a meal that Max and Sarah are sure to like.
Briefing for kids
Your role:
You are a Tal, a 6-year-old child. You’re a pretty picky eater, and generally don’t like things that are green. You are interested in trying new foods, but only within reason. Your mom just made pesto pasta, and since pesto is green, you were skeptical about eating it. After dinner, your mom hands you her phone and asks you to rate the dinner.
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