cdoll's blog

After we met this week Madison and I had a few goals and projects we needed to work on. One was deciding on ten restaurants and finding their nutritional facts menu so that the computer science team can work on incorporating a formula/guidelines we think up into the app. We then went through these menus and took examples of food and rated them Woah, Slow, or Go. Not surprisingly most of the fast food restaurants consisted of all Woah foods even if these foods were listed under a "healthy eating" category.

This week we will be meeting as a large group so that us (the Nutritional Team) can present the information that we have come up with thus far to our Computer Science Team. I'll be presenting what I wrote about in my last blog - different ways to present information to our audience. As a team (Dr. Hingle, Madison, and myself) have decided that the "go, slow, woah" method was our best option.

This week I really got down to business. First, after deciding how much we liked the way the application Fooducate rated their food I was assigned to look further into the exact methods and criteria used to grade food. They used four categories: nutrients, ingredients, category of the food item, and processing. All of which mainly focused around the idea encouraged nutrients, natural ingredients, and minimal processing were key to making a healthy food in the eyes of Fooducate.

Week 2 was a mixture of wrapping up week 1's activities and beginning week 3's. For week 3 I went through my handful of downloaded applications and using the HIMSS usability scale rated a handful of categories such as "I would use this application in the future" and "I thought the various functions in this system to be well integrated". Most of the applications I had come across were really cool. Fooducate and FoodStreet were two of my favorites yet when it came to actual nutritional content the USDA Foods Application outdid them all with it's myriad of categories and food choices.

This week I had only a handful of goals, many of which involved reading materials about designing appropriate applications. I have to admit reading a mountain of text can be a bit intimidating but I found some of the stuff to be really useful and, to be honest, I had no idea how much thought went into an application. Everything from the information you provide to the color scheme needs to have a meaning and reason.

Hello! I’m Chelsea Doll, a junior at the University of Arizona and majoring in Public Health and minoring in Nutritional Sciences. Besides working on this amazing CREU project this next year I also have two jobs, one at In-N-Out Burger and the other at Famous Sam’s. As I’m sure you’re questioning (because I question it too) I do work with bad-for-you burgers and fried bar food even though both my major and minor would balk at the thought (the forefathers of these disciplines are probably turning in their graves).