mkramer's blog

As the semester is closing out, we have concluded our user testing and have some great feedback to work with!

Both Chelsea and I have interviewed five or more people and received their feedback about our application. Questions consisted of what do or don't you like about this app? What would you change about this app to make it easier to understand? Do you see yourself using this app in your daily life? And would you recommend this app to friends or family, why or why not?

This morning we met with the computer science team to view their prototype of the app. They had the majority of it ready to go, but some complications with receiving the entire data base of nutrition info from each restaurant. One member of the computer science team has most of that information and will be sending it to the rest of the team within the next few days. They are hoping to have the entire app up and running with all of the data base information very soon. Once that is complete the nutrition team can begin with our testing and record progress from there.

Over the break we worked on interviewing friends and family about some of their pre-conceived notions regarding health and mobile health applications. Some of the questions included "How do you describe a healthy diet?", "What mobile health applications do you currently use?", and "What features do you like in that current application?" We each interviewed five people and are planning to use this data to better our current idea of what to include in this application. Once the application gets going we will also have an after usability test to interview people with as well.

As the semester is coming to a close, we have made remarkable progress over the past few months and are very excited for where this project is heading! We have developed a prototype, entered the nutrition guidelines and tips for making foods go, slow or woah, and are planning on starting testing when we return in January. Over the winter break we plan to ask family and friends some pre-trial questions such as, what do you define healthy as, etc.

These past couple of weeks we have been still searching and coming up with design ideas for the app. We have searched through multiple different children and nutrition apps to see what will work best. This past week we specifically worked on what types of questions we wlll eventually want to be asking our test audience. These questions will obviously be open ended and deal with usability of the app, health information on the app, and what qualities were helpful or not.

A few weeks ago the nutrition team and computer science team met to view the prototype and go over the full look of the app. I was out of town for that meeting, but I was caught up via email the next week. Last Tuesday the nutrition team met to nail down some fonts colors and themes we'd like for the app to send to the computer science team. During this meeting we also discussed some alternative health tips to make red or yellow foods into green foods. After compiling that list of tips and putting some examples of colorful apps together, we seem to be on track for this upcoming week.

When we met last Tuesday we were assigned to come up with 10 total fast food restaurants that are most popular these days. From those ten we provided nutrition facts and picked items to rank on their menu. Of those three items they can either be "woah, slow or go" ratings. Although something may be ranked as slow or woah it is always possibly to make it healthier by switching to a wheat bread or no bread at all, changing condiments that are on the item, eliminating the french fries, etc.

Although we did not meet last week, we have been continuing to work on our app research and putting together what our ideal mobile health app will look like.

On Tuesday, Chelsea, Melanie and I met to review our research thus far and really dive into what key features we can and cannot live without. Based on this information we will be presenting our ideas to the Computer Science team on Friday at our monthly meeting.

After we met last week, our goal for this week was to really dive into what we want this app to look like. How will we make it user friendly? Who will be using it and how will we help them to meet their health goals, etc.

My specific focus point was user experience while Chelsea is focusing on content validation. For user experience we want to keep in mind the preferences of diverse user groups, overall user goals and activities, and also user motivation including beliefs and practices. With all of that said, I set out to answer a few questions about our dream app....

For this week, we still were making comments on the apps that we researched during the previous week. Part of our assignment this week was to make comments on the usability aspect of each app using the "Himss" scale. Some of the questions included thing such as, I would like to use this system frequently, I found the system unnecessarily complex, I thought the system was easy to use, etc. We ranked each of those questions on a scale of 1-5, one being completely disagree and five being completely agree.