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- 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.
Notes
User 1:
- Good: Used tabs for navigation but commented "I guess I could've also used the other link", referring to the links in the various sections of the home/splash page. The user quickly understood how to navigate around the website.
- Good: When viewing the food page, the user commented "I like the color coding" (the color-coded location tags). They were able to parse the information on the page quickly.
- Major: The user did not understand some of the food classifications (protein vs. vegetables... "what is a chick pea?")
- Solution: include more food categories that describe food types more clearly (meat instead of protein for example)
- Good: When playing with sorting options, the user stated, "This is convenient! I can look at the stuff I have in my freezer!" Different sorting option allowed the user to fine-tune the display to exactly what she wanted to view.
- Catastrophic: The user could not figure out how to change a food item once it was created - this is because the website does not really allow for this functionality (an item must be deleted and recreated).
- Solution: implement the ability to change food properties and add affordances for being alterable (dashed box, add a dedicated button for changed food items, etc.)
- Major: The user said, while looking at food, "I would like to be able to sort these...". The sorting function is there, but there is no affordance for it (icons and clickable category titles).
- Solution: add icons and a button-like appearance to the category titles - this way users will know to click on them in order to sort by the different headings.
- Good: When viewing the budget page, the user said "This makes sense" (referring to the progress bar). They were able to easily point out how much money they had left in their food budget.
- Major: When editing a previous purchase amount in task 5, pressing enter causes a new line to appear in the text box rather than causing the new value to take effect. They were not able to determine how to enter the value.
- Solution: pressing enter should submit the new value rather than entering a new line
- Major: Due to bugs with the ajax code, updating the budget did not immediately refresh the different views on the budget page. This decreased system visibility and left the user rather confused.
- Solution: make sure that all changes that occur on the website immediately update the displayed information
- Major: When entering rice into the add food dialog box, the user commented that there is no "never expires" or "expires in a very, very long time" option.
- Solution: not all foods expire in an amount of time that is easy to enter with a calendar, so we should include some options for quickly selecting longer time periods (a month, a year, never, etc.)
- Minor: When entering information into the add food dialog box, the user was not interested in entering categories and locations.
- Solution: better defaults should be offered for the categories and locations so that ignoring these areas has very little effect on the system (other for food type, fridge or some other default tag for location)
- Good: When searching for recipes, the user commented "This is so neat! I can make them!" and "This is actually really convenient...". The visual variables (icon: shape, color) indicating which recipes could be made right now where easily visibile to the user.
- Minor: The user did not immediately notice the search options available to them and did not always know exactly what criteria were being used to perform the recipe query.
- Solution: The recipe list pane should list what search refinements are currently being used (like "Currently searching for entrees with no meat and a focus on asparagus...")