GR6 - User Testing
1. Design
1.0 Login Page
The login screen is very standard.
1.1 Meals
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.
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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 the form would be consistent with the one on the Groceries page.
1.2 Groceries
In our final implementation, the grocery list is on a separate page than meal entry. We decided to separate these two functions because the grocery list is non-essential, but rather a tool for efficiency, and new users were confused by it when presented with it right away (before learning the main purpose of the site). We also added a brief explanation to the top of this page, since we realized that even if the grocery list by itself is made very learnable, the purpose of the grocery list is not by itself completely self-explanatory.
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The grocery list demoed in GR5 morphed out of a design that was created after the computer prototyping and discarded shortly before the GR5 submission. This design was itself a halfway point, a “halfway list” that consisted of a form with a single input item, that when submitted would push its contents into a viewable list. There were a few problems with this design. For one, editing items required either opening up the current details in a new window or sidebar, which involved making a replica of the form used to enter items in the first place. This did not seem elegant. The alternative was to push all editing of details to that one form and to limit users to either adding an item or to editing an item. This discarded design still might have created confusion for users.
1.3 Analytics
The final Analytics page was designed to resemble the Meals page for internal consistency. On the left-hand side of the page, toggles like the ones on the Meals page are used to select statistics for different food groups or meals, and calendars are used to select the date range for the analytics. The graph itself shows details of data points when hovered over, and takes up the same space as the Meals calendar.
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