mkramer's blog

End of Semester User Testing

mkramer — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 17:16:28 +0000

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?

For the most part, I received very positive feedback, people were very impressed with our progress and how sophisticated the app was for such a short amount of time working on it. Everyone said it was very easy to understand and was very straight-forward. They liked how clear it was to see which foods were good to eat and which were not so good to eat. However, there were also some things we need to work on. The critiques included comments such as adding more visual interest such as color or more features to the app. One person also mentioned adding a diary function to the app so users can keep track of what they're eating.

Since this app is geared toward younger children, we kept it very simple and basic. There are obviously tons of improvements we could make, but that would require much more time and money going into this project!

Overall, I'd say it was a success and I am personally so proud of both teams that put so much effort into this project!

February 13

mkramer — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 16:47:31 +0000

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. Our questions are ready to go and we are finalizing an intro statement to be shown in the app store when people try to download this program.

First Blog of 2nd Semester

mkramer — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 19:34:58 +0000

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. Those questions will include such things as how easy was this application to use, etc. We have our first meeting this coming friday, January 25th and will get a game plan going from there!

End of Semester

mkramer — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 04:33:17 +0000

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. Once we have finished those preliminary questions we can fine tune our prototype to ensure the app is answering the questions we would like to receive information about. I'm so excited to see where this app goes next semester and I truly believe we can have great success with this!

Week 11/12

mkramer — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 02:11:43 +0000

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. Once we can narrow down what specific questions we will ask, we can start testing with real audience members to further tweak and perfect this application.

Week 10

mkramer — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 23:14:48 +0000

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. We will meet again this Tuesday to discuss what's left for the remaining few weeks of the semester.

Week 6

mkramer — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 19:27:54 +0000

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.

We will meet again this tuesday as well as Friday as a big group. Friday we will propose a name for the app and show potential designs for the computer science team to work with.

Friday's Presentation

mkramer — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 15:15:40 +0000

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.

We decided that our main features need to be location, a discussion forum or feedback mechanism, and definitely some sort of rating system for customers to say whether that specific food was good or not. An optional feature would be including total energy balance such as exercise and some sort of calorie log so people can see how many calories their daily activity is burning.

All of these features will depend on Thienne and Jorge's ability to code what we are wanting for our ideal app. Hopefully after this Friday's meeting we will continue to move forward in developing this app and truly getting things rolling!

Week 4 assignment

mkramer — Sun, 16 Sep 2012 21:34:58 +0000

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....

1) Who is our audience?
-Our audience is mainly children from 8-14 years old as well as their families, all at risk for type 2 diabetes. Our goal is to help them make healthy food choices while out to eat at restaurants, food stands or convenience stores. These types of stores all have pre-made foods that are unable to have a nutrition label scanned in order to help their decision.

2) How will we reach them?
-We will obviously be communicating with these families solely through this app. Hopefully our ideal family will have some sort of ipad, iphone, ipod or droid phone that is able to download these apps. With all the technology out there and deals on these products, assuming they have at least one of these items is not too far-fetched. This app will be able to be downloaded for free as well, so it will not cost the families anything extra to have this feature on their phone or tablet.

3) What will motivate them to use this app?
-As stated before the free download is a key factor to obtaining this helpful app. Another key factor is easy usability and not too wordy or have too many steps once inside of the app. If the vocabulary gets too wordy or in depth, people will stop reading once they don't understand what's going on. A simple process in order to rate these foods is what we're aiming for. Maybe there could be some sort of database on this phone that includes various popular restaurants and convenience stores that users could rate the foods at each place and build a type of discussion forum. In order to do this, location services might be necessary to find each store. Once they find the location they're at there should be some sort of rating system that allows the user to see if other people found healthy food that allowed them to stick to their diets or not wander too far off of them. This is also where people could post about what NOT to get at each place as well.

During our next meeting we will discuss what Chelsea and I have come up with for these questions and then hopefully put together a plan to present to the computer science side of this research so they can start building the app for us.

Week 2 assingments

mkramer — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 23:29:10 +0000

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.

One of the goals for our upcoming meeting is to choose the app we like the best and why. We will then present that app during our meeting to the other researchers. Also we are going to choose the app which was easiest to use (could be the same one) and present that one as well. From there we will be able to move forward in actually designing the app that we'd like to develop!