Blogs

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.

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.

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.

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.

The final two weeks of the semester were spent fixing the current prototype. Due to some feedback from the rest of the team, the appearance of the application will likely be changing, but we wanted to make sure the basic functionality was complete.

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.

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.

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.

This week was spent configuring the servlet and the database to respond to real queries from the phone. The phone application also had to switch over from using the placeholder data that was being displayed thus far, to parsing and displaying information from the web server.

Since querying the web server can take some time, it was also a challenge to ensure that the application is responsive at all times, even when waiting for a response from the remote server.