GR6 - FoodAware User Testing
Design -
Our application has truly evolved from the start of this course. Our central problem we wished to solve and the task scenario have remained constant throughout the project. To refresh, the central problem was that people with dietary restrictions have difficulty finding foods. Our task scenario revolves around a vegetarian that finds it safe to consume chicken perusing a menu and selecting items that he/she wants to eat.
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Shown below is a photo of our summary page:
Design Alternatives Considered:
Implementation -
We relied on functionality from Parse to implement our design in order to share data between webpages. Page logic and interaction is accomplished client side and data such as restrictions, menu selections, and restaurant choice are loaded by querying a Parse account on each page load.
Evaluation -
We tested our implementation on three people. We allowed each person to choose items pertaining to their dietary restriction and tasked each user to enter their restrictions, browse restaurants and menus, and select items they would like to eat. We found users who indicated that they have food restrictions. Our users include a vegan, a chicken vegetarian, people and a person who is on the paleolithic diet.
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- Enter your food restrictions
- Browse restaurant menus
- Find some dishes that are safe for you to eat
Usability Issues Observed:
Users find it not easy to learn that the buttons on diet profile page are accordions and can be expanded. (Learnability - Major)
Users kept clicking the "minus" icon, and learned what that did. It took quite long for them to learn that the button can be clicked to expand the accordian.
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- One time viewable alert shown per user to show what functionality is provided for by the search bar.
He Users wanted all the accordions to stay open "to see what I've clicked on."(Efficiency, Minor)
user User wanted to keep both the grains and dairy categories to both remain open so that he could scan them both to know all options were selected.
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- Correct our accordion behavior for our categories to keep items open once they have been activated once.
Users still unsure how to "go forward" (Efficiency, Minor)
One user wondered around on the pref/restriction page for a good while before clicking on "select restaurants".
Potential solutions:
- Shape the "progression" button as arrows to strongly indicate progress.
- Make the button animate slightly when the system thinks sufficient pref/restriction is being added to notify the user he can progress.
Users are disappointed when not a lot of menu items show up on menu page due to over-restriction (Efficiency, Minor)
One user restricted a lot of items, and was surprised some of the restaurants has no menu left for him.
Potential solutions:
- Able to rank restaurants by number of safe dishes
- Display on the menu page the hidden items due to unsafe ingredients
Users unsure of what 'plus' and 'minus' icons mean (Learnability, Minor)
One user believed that the green plus would add an item to their restrictions and was confused when it instead added it to the restrictions. This is even after we had attached tooltip explanations to the buttons.
Potential solutions:
- Colorize preference and restriction 'wells' red/green accordingly.
- Explicitly label buttons 'prefer'/'restrict'.
Users liked how polished the UI is (good)
One user said "this is nice, so professional!"
Users chose to select preference ingredients first before filling out restrictions
This reinforces our decision to include preferences into our design because people's natural tendencies are to pick items that they want before what they cannot have.
Reflection -
Our design explanation lists our thought process from start to finish with our implementation. The guiding factor for our designs was primarily feedback from GR1-GR5. With extra time we would have most likely continued using our design and refining it, rather than start a fresh, all-new implementation. With that said, we have discussed further areas of improvement that we would have liked to incorporate into our design.
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