cdoll's blog

Final Thoughts

cdoll — Wed, 22 May 2013 01:01:08 +0000

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.

Semester 2, Week 9

cdoll — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 06:06:10 +0000

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

Most of it was really positive with lots of people saying they'd love to use an app like this. Using green, yellow, and red as our colors to signify go, slow, and woah got a lot of positive reactions since there was almost no need to explain what the colors signified. The simple design and display of information was also well received. Everyone really liked that unless you wanted more information the app would only provide you with whether or not the food was healthy enough to eat. And having two different buttons, one for nutritional information and one for tips also got great comments as it gave the users more control of what they would like to see.

With the good, however, came the bad. Some people believed that our labels for foods didn't match their nutritional value. As mentioned in my last blog post one of the users felt that oatmeal being labeled as 'slow' was inaccurate and that it should be labeled 'go'. Others suggested that we should rethink our equation based on the category of food. Someone else mentioned that we should also consider the ingredients as this might change the go, slow, woah label of the menu item.

Another comment, neither good nor bad, was that some of the foods listed were unneeded and could be deleted from the app. Most of these foods were part of the 'sides' category. Also of the five restaurants that Jorge added to the application only a few were showing up. For example I was never able to find Subway!

All in all, I would say the app is a success and our idea is a hit! I wish I could work on it longer I feel like this has great potential to be an amazing, successful, and useful application.

Semester 2, Week 7

cdoll — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 15:07:20 +0000

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.

So far I've had a couple people look at our App and I've gotten really positive feedback. Most were saying how they'd love to use an app like this! The one suggestion I got was that sometimes things were considered 'slow' or even 'go' and they probably shouldn't be. We will definitely have to go back and reevaluate some of our equations and categorization.

One suggestion from a family member to help fix this was consider the individual categories and not just food as a whole. This came about when we were in the 'breakfast' tab and noticed that some foods seemed to be miss-labeled, oatmeal categorized as Slow even though we would consider it Go.

Overall, great feedback so far and I'm excited to see what others say!

Semester 2, Week 2

cdoll — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 02:36:28 +0000

For the next couple of weeks our goal is to take our android research phones out to 10 people and interview them using our questions. I figured because my sister's birthday is this upcoming weekend and I'll be spending it with a lot of my family in Phoenix, it's a good of a time as any to interview 10 people!

I guess I'll see what other assignments are in store at our next meeting on the 22nd.

Semester 2, Week 1

cdoll — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 06:24:46 +0000

And we're back! It's been a nice break from school and projects but it will be nice to get back into the swing of things. After interviewing friends and family we were able to finalize our questions. Luckily we created some pretty strong questions that didn't need much editing and each of us (Madison and myself) were able to get answers that we hoped the questions would provide.

The only trouble was our question "What applications do you use on your phone?" For many of our friends and family members the answer was "None." This, of course, proves a bit of an issue considering we're trying to get peoples preferences on what they like or dislike about already created food applications. Madison decided that the best course of action was to have a follow up question, "If you were to have a food application on your phone, what would you want it to include?"

Now the next step is to get our application onto a couple smart phones and begin interviewing our peers! I'm excited!

Week 14

cdoll — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 22:42:28 +0000

The semester is finally over! After finalizing and editing our focus groups questions the goal for the break to begin asking friends and family members and see the answers we get. These answers can help us determine a lot: Are we asking the right questions? Are our questions confusing in any way? Are there any questions we should add? Any questions that should be combined? Any questions that need to be separated? My goal is to question as many people as I can and to get a wide range in age, sex, and gender. I'm excited to see how it goes! I've never interviewed anyone before.

Week 12 & 13

cdoll — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 23:36:10 +0000

As our first semester begins to come to a close our tasks each week have continued strong. This past week was dedicated to the main objective of coming up with questions for our future focus groups. However, before any questions could be formed we read up on how these questions are formed - proper phrasing, ordering, and simplicity. After thinking up a handful of questions, discussing their significance, and making any edits we decided that questions should be grouped into two segments those asked before viewing our application and those asked afterwards.

Examples of questions asked before testing our application would be "Define a healthy diet" and "Do you use any healthy applications on your phone?" All the questions in this group are to get an idea of where the individual stands on their view of nutrition, fast food, and how they use applications on their phone. Questions asked after looking over our application were designed to get the testers reaction and input of what we have created so far and ways to improve. Examples are "What did you like best about this application?" and "Is there anything you wish this application did?"

Week 11

cdoll — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 17:50:57 +0000

This past week consisted of two goals. The first was continuing our quest of Android applications that we would like to use as a model and inspiration to our own. The second was to figure out how we want to test our application, I focused a little more on questions about content validation and improving it.

When it comes to looking for Android application models I've tried to be open to any possibilities and really consider what I liked about these application that we could use in our own. For some application there may only be one aspect that I liked about them (for example in a voice translator application the one element I listed was the icons next to the countries). For others, especially applications geared toward nutrition, an entire page within the app could be a perfect replica of what I was imagining.

As for testing our application I've considered a few questions: What makes you consider a food to be "healthy"? Because of the information in this application how has your choice at this restaurant changed? What else would you like to know about these fast food menus? Is any of the information confusing to understand?

Week 9

cdoll — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 16:48:18 +0000

After our last full group meeting and looking at the prototype that Jorge has been working on we decided to make a few changes to hopefully make our application even better and more functional. The first change is more for visual modification: moving our Woah, Slow, Go icons from the right of the menu item to the left. We also decided to make these icons clickable with a pop-up window of healthy suggestions to make a Woah or Slow food into a Go food.

The second change involves more a strategic decision to urge people to choose Go foods when eating out. We decided that when a restaurant menu is open we would list Go foods first so that individuals would be persuaded to choose these items first.

Lastly, our assignments for this week are to keep working on finding pre-teen/teen educational apps to inspire our own design and think of general recommendations to turn foods healthy (for example asking for skim milk in coffee drinks).

Week 7

cdoll — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 20:55:43 +0000

This week the Nutrition Team will be taking it a bit easier. We have three tasks ahead of us: figure out our criteria to give to the Computer Science Team for what will constitute as Woah, Slow, and Go, give tips to make healthier choices and changes to the 15 fast food chains we decided on, and find kid friendly apps that we like as inspiration for our own.

Luckily, our first task (Woah, Slow, Go Criteria) is already taken care of and sent to them so we just have the last two tasks to work on! We've been discussing over the last week or so ideas on how to make healthier choices so our second task should be a piece of cake. As for finding inspirational kids apps, at least for me, is going to be a whole new adventure.