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To populate the recipes page with recipes containing the user's ingredients, we piggyback off of an external recipe search site (www.supercook.com). We analyzed their site's code and learned to formulate a query to their server. As mentioned above, we then used a cross-domain ajax query to get the list of recipes from the website. The refinement choices for the query, displayed on the side of the page, were all options available on the eternal site. Whenever a choice is clicked, Dough records all the options that are chose (meal type, special requirements, and focus foods) as well as the list of foods current in the user's collection (stored in a database and retrieved with django). It translates these criteria into a query string as dictated by the external site and performs the cross-domain ajax query. Once the website responds, it converts the result into a javascript object containing information about the current page, the number of found recipes, and the recipe details themselves (URL, name, ingredients, etc.). It iterates through these recipes and adds HTML to the recipe list panel accordingly.
Evaluation
Briefing
Dough is a web application that helps you manage your food and your food budget. You can track foods you've purchased, see when your foods are about to expire, look at how much you've spend on food, and find recipes tailored to your food supply. It is built to help you get the most out of your food purchases.
Tasks
We felt that most of our tasks from paper prototyping were still applicable to our final user testing. However, we added a few additional tasks to test a larger breadth of functionality.
- It's Wednesday, March 16th. Your vegan friend Bobby is coming over tonight for dinner. You log in to Dough to check what you can make.
- Go to the Dough website and check what food you currently have.
- Your face falls and you sigh dramatically when you realize you don't have anything Bobby can eat. Looks like you need to make a trip to Shaws.
- Check your budget to see how much you have left to spend on your trip to Shaws.
- While checking your budget, you remember that you received a large tax refund in the mail and can afford to spend more money on food this month.
- Increase your food budget to $300.
- Your remaining money supply seems really low.
- Check your previous purchases for any strange-looking entries.
- You find an erroneous entry of $500 when you meant to enter $50.
- Correct the purchase amount to read $50 instead of $500
- Wandering joyously up and down the aisles at Shaws you find broccoli, whole grain rice, and tofu. You buy the three items for $12.45.
- Add your food on the Dough site, recording when you bought it, where you're putting it (broccoli + tofu go in the fridge and rice goes in the cabinet), and how much the total purchase cost.
- As dinner approaches, you realize you can't just serve Bobby raw broccoli and rice.You need a recipe for some dish.
- Use Dough to search for dinner recipes you can make with your new foods that Bobby can eat. Since your carrots are going to expire soon, make sure the recipe contains carrots.