GR1 - Task analysis

User analysis

We are targeting MIT undergraduate students, all of whom eat. A major division exists in our user population between students who are on a meal plan and those who are not. Each of these two groups have their own subgroups. For those on a meal plan, there are students who are on the MIT House Dining plan (where a certain number of meals are provided every day in certain dorms), and there are those who are on the meal plan of some living group (like a fraternity, sorority, or independent living group). Among the students who are not on a meal plan, there are those students who cook regularly and those who eat out regularly.

Users in General

General Statistics:

• Age: 17 - 23
• Gender: roughly 45% Female, 55% Male
• Literate, and technologically adept** Good typing skills
  • Experienced with using a web browser
• Some not willing to meet and/or form dining groups with strangers
• May pset in a study group and sometimes eat with them
• Eating habits vary per living group
• Very frequently multi-task.

Users on a Meal Plan
General Notes:

• Eating Habits
  • May share at least some meals with large numbers of people
  • Might have some limited choice in what they eat

Student in FSILG:

• Eating Habits** Shares meals with large groups of friends
  • Eats at the same location for every meal-plan prepared meal
• Usually has some say in what food is prepared 
  • Usually only 1 menu per meal though
  • May not be able to find out the menu before a meal
• Usually has access to communal food in order to cook with on occasion
• Usually has access to nice cooking environment (commercial grade kitchen, lots of pots/pans, etc.)
• Persona:** Andrew is a sophomore in Course 9 and lives at a fraternity 20 minutes from campus. He gets dinner 6 nights a week and lunch 6 days a week (if he goes back to his house), and has to cook on one night of the week as part of a cooking team. He sometimes cooks for himself on the weekends and has a sparsely-stocked personal fridge. Andrew is comfortable with a computer. He checks email a few times a day and Facebook much more often.

Student on MIT Dining Plan:

• Eating Habits** Eats in a large dining hall with other students
  • May eat in a small group in this larger crowd
• Has very little say in what food is served** However, usually can choose from a variety of options among the food served (i.e. several menus available)
  • Can find the menu in advance on the MIT Dining website
• Exceptions to the above exist: some students on the required MIT Dining Plan don’t eat at the dining halls all the time, choosing instead to cook for themselves
• Persona: 
  • Betty is a junior in Course 7 who lives in McCormick. She doesn’t mind the new mandatory meal plan because she doesn't enjoy cooking. She generally stays in her own dorm for meals and eats with other people on her floor. Occasionally she goes to another dorm if a lot of her friends are going. Her personal fridge is usually stuffed with leftovers dining hall food. She is very computer savvy and knows enough programming to hack small odds and ends. She checks Facebook and Twitter with her phone a few times a day and checks e-mail every 8 minutes or so.

Users Not on a Meal Plan
General notes:

• More likely to be concerned with finances
• If not in FSILG, not likely to have very elaborate or commercial grade public kitchen equipment
• Those in dorms all have access to a kitchen on their dorm floor
• Likely to have communal refrigerator

Frequent cooks:

• Can more carefully monitor what they eat (and how much they spend on it)
• Seem to generally be willing to splurge every once in a while to get higher quality ingredients
• Often motivated to cook because it’s much cheaper than going out or buying in to the MIT meal plan
• Eats either alone or with small groups of friends/neighbors
• Goes to cooking websites for recipes, etc. (usually have just one that they really like)
• Persona:** Christina is a freshman at East Campus aspiring to be Course 6-3. She cooks for herself because she’s pescetarian (vegetarian + fish). She really enjoys cooking with and for groups of people and tries to organize group meals usually about once a week. She has easy access to a big kitchen on her floor. She doesn't have her own fridge, but there’s space in the communal fridge. She keeps a drawer well stocked with spices and seasonings and grocery shops twice a month. She knows how to use a computer efficiently (including web browser), but doesn’t know anything about programming yet. She checks email once a day.

Those who mostly eat out:

• Have a huge say in what they eat, but less of a say in what ingredients go into what they eat.
• Don’t always know nutritional information about food consumed, but might not care
• Spend more on food than people who cook all the time, since it’s usually more expensive to eat out
• Goes out once in a while with small groups of friends
• Orders food through websites like CampusFood.com, etc.
• Persona:** Dave is a senior in Course 8 living at Burton Conner. He orders a large quantity of take-out, like a large pizza or a large dish of pasta, every 2 or 3 days, and saves the leftovers for the days in between. As a result, he is always on the hunt for good deals on food, and uses online coupons like Groupon. He goes out to eat at Pour House on Saturdays with a group of other Course 8 seniors. He has a personal fridge to store the food in. Dave types quickly, checks e-mail constantly, and checks Facebook maybe once a month.

Task analysis

Manage personal nutrition

Global precondition: user has an account, and has identified self
Subtasks: (see below)

• Record food in possession (optional)
• Record consumed food
• View food history
• View food statistics

--> Record food in possession (optional)
Goal: Keep track of food items in user’s possession. Users can pick items from this list to speed up updating daily food records. (see “Record consumed food” below)
Frequency: weekly or twice a week
Precondition: physically have food in possession
Subtasks:

• Add food items to a list
• Delete food from list
• View list

Possible errors:

• User enters incorrect food, or misspells
• User forgets to add a food item in possession
• User forgets to remove food items no longer in possession
• Food item remains in user’s possession too long, and expires/rots

--> Record consumed food
Goal: create a record of what food a user consumed
Frequency: daily
Precondition: have consumed food
Subtasks:

• Specify a new food log entry
• Enter information pertaining to the food eaten, such as:** Type of meal (breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, other)
  • Date
  • What food items were eaten*** User can optionally choose this from the list of food in possession
  • Optionally for each food item:*** Amount of item eaten 
    • Food group that item belongs to
    • Calories
    • Cost
• Submit information
• As an alternative to the above, if a user is a member of a Group (see section IV below), user can simply import a Group food entry to own food log** User can further edit this entry once it is imported (e.g. to delete items he or she did not actually eat, or to add items)

Possible errors:

• User enters a wrong food item
• User incorrectly specifies a detail about a food item
• User enters a list of correct food items, but all on the wrong day

--> View food history
Goal: View what the user has eaten in the past
Frequency: weekly to monthly
Precondition: have made at least one meal entry
Subtasks:

• Specify which entries to show** Specify a date range
  • Optional: categories of meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner, etc.) to display
• Specify level of detail to show** Choose between a summary or full details

Possible errors:

• User specifies an impossible date range (going backwards in time)
• User has no food history to display

--> View food statistics
Goal: See trends in a user’s food data
Frequency: several times a week to monthly
Precondition: have made at least one meal entry
Subtasks:

• Specify data range for statistics
• Specify the type of analytics desired. Can sort by trends in:** Proportions of different food groups
  • Food costs
  • Calorie consumption

Possible errors:

• User specified impossible date range (going backwards in time)
• User has no food history, and thus no statistics to display

Further Notes:

• All tasks are performed by an individual user.
• Tasks are probably learnt individually by experimentation on the site or by reading an instruction page.
• All tasks are performed at a computer. Users may be distracted or multitasking.
• Users may be constrained on time, or will easily see the service as a hassle if it takes more than a few minutes per day to use. The tasks, especially daily ones, should take as little time as possible.

Justifications

This Task Analysis reflects our interviews and observations of people in different dining situations at MIT. We interviewed a student who lived in Burton-Conner (BC), a dorm with no dining plan; a student who lived at pika, an MIT independent living group with a house-run, required meal plan; several students at the MIT Alpha Delta Phi fraternity (ADP), ranging from those who cooked very little to the most active cook in the fraternity; and two students who lived in Ashdown House, a dorm with both a required dining plan (dinner only) and plenty of individual kitchens.

Originally, our plan was to create a site that helped students eat healthier by creating a site where students could find other students with similar tastes in food and organize cooking teams. However, the student at BC expressed discomfort with cooking with strangers and possibly even acquaintances, and said that scheduling would be a big problem for MIT students. The most active cook at ADP expressed similar concerns, saying that the people he might potentially cook with would be people he sees day-to-day anyway, and he doesn’t need a website to connect with them. Furthermore, as the student at pika showed, some students are already on mandatory dining plans that can cover all three meals of the day, and thus have pre-determined cooking groups. Many students also buy lunch on campus (e.g. from the Stata Center, Cafe Four, or food trucks) and live in dorms that require a dinner meal plan, meaning they have less of a need to cook. In fact, with the proposed changes to MIT dining, starting next year, some students may be eating all their meals at a dining hall. In addition, the students at Ashdown (one cooks dinner a few times per week and eats at the dining hall the other nights, while the other cooks dinner on most nights) pointed out that they wouldn’t use the site very much (on the order of twice a month) since cooking in groups usually takes more time than cooking by themselves.

Though our potential users would not use our intended service, they told us problems that were relevant to them. The student at BC wanted to be able to track her food intake, nutrition, and food costs easily. She said she used to keep track of these details on a spreadsheet, but it was too clunky to use. Thus, we came up with the idea of the food log. The student at pika told us about problems with planning food for a large group of people, and requested the ability to list menus for the house, arranging for late dinners (when people can’t make it to dinner, they request food to be set aside for them), and for signing up to do kitchen duties. To serve this population, we added the ability to create “Groups,” which allow people to share food logs (since they eat some similar meals) and aggregate their communications about food. This functionality could be useful to all FSILG’s that have a house meal plan.

Domain analysis

Most of the labels in this domain analysis are fairly self-explanatory. The “Student With A Meal Plan” user class are students who have a dining plan that’s mandated by their living group (i.e. fraternities, sororities, independent living groups, and dorms). Some living groups do not have a meal plan and many students decide to provide for their own housing, so they would fall into the category “Student Without A Meal Plan.” Some relations in the diagram use the word “manage.” That includes the tasks of creating, reading, updating, and deleting parts of the target. An “Entry” is a record of what a user has eaten and its cost.