GR2 - Designs

Scenario 

(Note: major tasks are in bold font.)

Fred is a junior living in Burton Conner. He goes shopping at Trader Joe’s every weekend and prepares simple dishes for himself. Sometimes he buys food on campus.

It’s now 1 PM on Sunday. Fred has just returned from Trader Joe’s and wants to record the food he bought and also record the food he ate last night and today (dinner, breakfast, and lunch).

He goes to the DailyDigest home page, logs in and sees his personal home page. The Trader Joe’s receipt is right in front of him, so Fred decides to record his newly-purchased groceries. Fred navigates to his Food List and enters in each item he purchased and its cost. After entering in “aspargus,” he sees he has misspelled the word and has to fix that entry. Then Fred gets a phone call and is temporarily distracted.

Fred finishes the phone call. Now, he wants to record the food he ate for last night’s dinner and today’s breakfast and lunch.

Fred records last night’s dinner, which was spaghetti and meatballs from Baker House Dining, then moves on to breakfast. Since Fred cooked breakfast for himself, he wants to indicate that he ate some of the items in his Food List. (But he has just added food items from his Trader Joe’s shopping trip, so they are now mixed in with the food he possessed before going to Trader Joe’s. This makes it potentially harder for him to find the food he wants.) Fred fills in his breakfast, which was two pieces of toast with peanut butter, two scrambled eggs, a banana, and a cup of milk. Incidentally, Fred finished all his peanut butter during breakfast, and wants to note that change on his Food List. He also doesn’t know what food group peanut butter should be in, but he knows it is high in fat and protein.

After recording breakfast, Fred notices that he forgot to enter in the last item on his Trader Joe’s receipt into his Food List. (He had been distracted by the phone call.) He is a bit obsessive-compulsive, so he saves his breakfast entry before entering lunch, and then goes to record the last item on his receipt.

After fixing the Food List, Fred returns to entering in his lunch. For lunch, he had eaten a Subway sandwich at the Student Center, and then wandered into a multicultural exhibit put on by a student group. There, he had eaten some new food, though he doesn’t remember their names or necessarily know what went into them. He thinks he can guess the number of calories he consumed there, though.

Fred is suddenly curious about his eating habits. First, he looks at the entries he made throughout the week, just to glance over everything he ate. This view makes him see that he accidentally recorded yesterday’s dinner as being for today (he put in the wrong date), and he keeps in mind he has to go fix that. Next, he seeks some analysis of this week’s eating habits. He had set a goal this week to eat more vegetables and spend less money on snack food, so he wants to see a graph of the amount of vegetables he has consumed in the past month (in order to see a trend), and also a graph of how much money he has spent on snack food in the past month.

Fred goes back to change the date for the erroneous dinner entry. Finally satisfied, Fred leaves the DailyDigest website.

Designs

Design #1

Stresses learnability, simplicity, and error prevention over efficiency.

• Attempts to make interfaces externally consistent and familiar so that they are easy to learn.
• Doesn't do anything fancy. Just has simple tabbed pages, textboxes, drop-down menus, and buttons.
• Some components could be more efficient, but would cause the user to make more errors. This design prefers good error prevention over efficiency.

Design #2

Stresses efficiency over learnability and simplicity.

• Makes it as easy as possible for experienced users to accomplish the main tasks. The most-used tasks (recording meals and recording purchased food) can be done right on the home page, and less visible (and thus less learnable) editing styles are chosen because they are faster.

Stresses efficiency over correctness.

• Users make estimates about their caloric intake, rather than calculating calories based on formulae, e.g. (quantity of apple consumed) x (calories in 1 apple). The data collected is less refined than in Design #3.

Design #3

Makes use of extended metaphor to increase learnability.

Stresses learnability over efficiency

• Cannot do everything from The Room page (which is like a "home" page; it's where the user lands upon logging in).

Stresses visual simplicity over visibility

• Hides some details in order to reduce clutter. In these cases, it's possible for the user to see these details by clicking or hovering the mouse.