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The Meals page (formerly called the Meal Log) of our final implementation is not drastically different from the design used in earlier GR’s. It mimics the Google Calendar interface for good learnability, which was received positively by users in the heuristic evaluation and user testing stages. Unlike Google Calendar, meals (events in Google Calendar) are not centered around times of the day (3AM vs. 5PM), but rather by their meal type (breakfast vs. lunch). This makes the most sense for DailyDigest since we do not handle data about the time of day that meals were eaten at.
One of the components that we changed was the togglers on the left side of the screen. In pre-GR5 versions, the user could show or hide certain meals in a day/week/month, but evaluators in the heuristic evaluation suggested changing it to allow showing/hiding meals that contain a certain food group. This is more useful than toggling meals because meals are already segregated in the week view. We considered making the toggles different colors for good visibility, but we decided against it since it a meal can contain multiple food groups and it would have been too cluttered to represent multiple colors for every meal.
We also changed the Add Meal dialog. Initially it was a form that allowed users to enter multiple items at once, but we changed it to adding one item at a time, which would be saved in a buffer before a meal (with multiple items) could be saved. We changed this so that it would be consistent with the way that groceries are added in the Groceries page.
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Unfortunately, the dynamic sizing and resizing of the graph didn’t work for lower screen resolutions, which led to some usability problems. Users had to scroll the page to see the rest of the graph and the legend.
Evaluation
Reflection
We should have done more paper prototypes and earlier iterations before moving into the computer prototypes. We kept coming up with new ideas, and we never had opportunity to test these ideas on actual users. Because of this, our design suffered unnecessary complexity, both in the implementation and in the front-end.
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