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- The younger child could not read very well, and the only visual cue for the ingredients was the name of the ingredient. This would cause the caregivers to also have to be present when the children were giving feedback.
Solution: Include pictures with the icon as well as the name of the icon, and change the “yes/no” to happy face/sad face icons.
Major
- The older child found the toggle buttons difficult to use -- – they thought they could be dragged.
Solution: Make the toggle buttons look more like toggles and less like draggable buttons. Also, make them larger as the children seemed to have trouble guiding the mouse around. - caregivers Caregivers didn’t always realize that the search bar was not universal (queries were limited).
Solution: Either make the search bar universal or don’t display the search button until they type in a valid ingredient. - Some caregivers did not realize that the kid tiles were buttons at first.
Solution: Make the tiles have more affordances to make them look like buttons or include a textual cue.
Minor
- Users could figure out what the checkboxes meant, but a few found them counterintuitive. They felt that checking the box should mean that they need to buy something, instead of meaning they already had the ingredient.
Solution: Create separate sections for the ingredients-- when a user checks on off, it moves it to the “have” list, instead of the “need” list. - caregivers Caregivers didn’t always understand what the taste score was exactly, and it took some prompting to get them to notice/use it.
Solution: Make the taste score more prominent (change the color/make it the largest element of the results tile). - Some caregivers did not realize that they could search for multiple ingredients
Solution: Make the searched ingredients look more like discrete tiles, or include an example set of tiles in the search bar when they arrive at the site so they have an idea of what to search for.
Cosmetic
- Pressing enter on an ingredient in the search bar list only puts the ingredient in the search bar, and many users expected it to also search for that item
Solution: Make the search button more prominent. - Taste score doesn’t have to be from 100 to 0, because caregivers only really care about whether their kids will love it, won’t eat it, or don’t really care.
Solution: Use faces instead of numbers to communicate the taste score.
Reflection
Over the course of the iterative design process, we learned that our initial conceptions on what users will find easy/difficult is often very different from the reality. Before doing the paper prototype, we thought we had a good design, and then after doing the computer prototype, we thought we had a great design. However, there were still multiple usability problems. In fact, even after our final iteration we still have a long way to go.
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If we were to do it again, we would like to do more testing early on of users in our ideal demographic. Additionally, it would have been nice to test multiple designs, as there were many elements that we left out of our paper prototypes that may have been useful later on. We played it a bit safe with our design, and we’re proud of our final product. However, it It would have been a good exercise to perhaps try more things at the paper prototype phase.