Blogs

Now that schools out, finals over, and our project complete it's interesting to look back and see all that we have done. In less than a year a group of three undergraduates, a graduate student, and two University of Arizona faculty members were able to not only imagine but create an Android phone application. I walked into this project not knowing how it was going to turn out, but I have to say that I'm impressed by what we created! I hope that even if I'm no longer working on the project this application continues to evolve into something that the world can use.

The application is finally done. We had a final meeting to share all results that we have accumulated. The nutritional team shared the information from the user surveys, and we discussed improvements to the application that could be considered for future works.

Overall, the application seems to have been well received. There are still a few bugs, but as it was a prototype, the users were comfortable with this.

Since the previous wave of updates, updates have continued to be made for the app. Many of the categories generated by the automatic parser have been combined into more human-friendly categories. Using a web interface that I created, recommendations were input into the database by the nutritional team and show up in the application without actual updates to the application on the phone.

Here is a link to the promised application pictures!

http://www.cs.arizona.edu/~jbv/ftpics/

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?

User testing has ended and I now have some great feedback about our app!

It has been a while since I've updated this blog!

The Nutrition Team was on a bit of a hiatus as our Computer Science counter parts finished up to App so we could finally get some user feedback! I have to say I'm really pleased with what we have so far it looks amazing and runs how we imagined.

The application also had many usability tweaks as well. Any long operations were moved such that they work in the background while the user can navigate other portions of the application.

The layout for each page is now generated using the same methods for each screen, so that the layout is uniform between different screens. Uniform styles were also applied to each page of the application, to improve the appearance.

Minor tweaks were made as my understanding of Android increased -- layout optimizations that make the page load faster for the user were quite welcome.

The structure of the application was also greatly retooled to allow for different use cases. Our team decided that in order to better accommodate different types of requests, we should allow for different entrypoints into a restaurant menu -- for example, if a user wants to find restaurants with hamburgers, he should be able to look that up rather than having to guess a restaurant name.

The blog may have been a little neglected these past few weeks, but great process has been made. I will split up the work into several topics which will be the subjects of the next few posts.