The Making of Magic

Haseeb Khan

Geoff Robinson

Ovetta Sampson

HCI 460: User-Center Designed

The Problem: The Food Diary: A Painful Process

The Solution

Low-Fi Prototype

The User Testing

We tested our product with eight users. Two were “super users,” people we identified as early adopters.

One was an “atypical user,” a person we felt fit with our persona but didn’t fit into our market research and five “persona users,” users who fit the criteria of our personas

Our Testing Process

Featuring Haseeb Khan

Who Tested Our Product

• Heidi Case 47-yr-old female at-home mom, health and style-conscious. (Matched our persona “Jane Curtis.”)

• Kevin Merriman 59-yr-old, cyclist, hiker, golfer. 30 pounds overweight, non-drinker, non-smoker, married, retired General Manager of a vitamin factory.

User Testers Continued

• Liz Chong: Wife, mother of two children, sales executive who works from home and is doing her first Ironman in 2014.

• Nell Shields Bochenek: Wife, mother-to-be, assistant to the chairman of a private entity, an avid runner and marathoner in her early 40s.

User Testers Continued

• Kristen Cone: Twenty-six-year-old, female recent college graduate and unemployed, unmarried and no children.

• Terry Cone: Forty-nine-year-old retired, husband and father

• Keala Murdock: – single, female in her early-30s, assistant director and career specialist at a private university, a runner who hopes to complete a triathlon in the near future.

The Findings• Seven out of eight users completed all the tasks

within the allotted limit or less. (One user gave up in frustration when editing the food film.)

• 100% of the users found the product “easy to learn how to use, easy to extract data from and easy to engage the functionality.”

• Overall users felt the iPhone interface was good but needed improvement. For example, six out of eight users felt there was too much text and direction. Just wanted pics and that’s it.

The Findings

1. “Being able to set the ring to automatic is a nice feature.”

2. “I like that the device is small and non-obtrusive.”

3. “I really liked and think it helps seeing what you ate throughout the day.”

4. “The calories/nutritional information were a bit hard to read with the pictures.”

User PersonasAttributes Descriptions

Name Jon Schroder

Photo

Tagline Just living the dream man.

Age 36

Occupation Senior Engineer at Intel

Education Master’s Degree in Computer Engineering

Level of Computer

Comfort

As a tech professional Jon is very comfortable using gadgets to aid his triathlon

training. He has a Garmin Forerunner 910XT with bike mount and HRM, USB

ANT STICK, and GPS receiver. He also has a trainer that is hooked up to his

power meter. He uploads all his training rides to Strava.com so he can compare

his times with cyclists. He also downloads routes from Strava.com and

MapMyRide.com.

Goals/Motivations He’s a four-time Ironman and wants to shave an hour off his

Personal Record of 11:54 in Ironman. He believes focusing on

losing weight will help him gain speed in cycling. So he needs to

find a fitness application that not only allows him to log his

workouts but also his caloric intake.

Frustrations and Pain

Points

Still, Jon doesn’t have a lot time and would like to decrease the time it takes for

him to log his daily food intake.

Narrative Jon is a mid-career professional who has been doing triathlons for about 10

years. He was a collegiate sprinter and decided to do cycling as cross training

when he signed up for his first triathlon. Always a bit on the heavier side, Jon

has watched his weight all his life. Now that he’s trying to shave an hour off his

PR Ironman time he’s looking to the bike portion. He knows the less he weighs

the faster he rides. He wants to lose 25lbs by race day in 90 days. He keeps a

daily food journal, both analog and digital. He’s pretty accurate in logging his

food and caloric intake but mostly because he sticks to the same meals every

day for breakfast, lunch and dinner. He’d like to be able to have a little bit more

variety in his meal plans but doesn’t so he can stick to his caloric count without

having big discrepancies in data.

User Persona: Jane

Name Jane Curtis

Photo

Tagline “Family first.”

Age 29

Occupation At home mom

Education Bachelor’s degree

Level of Computer

Comfortmoderate/intermediate proficiency

Goals/Motivations To find an application to assist her in maintaining a healthy lifestyle

and in losing weight.

Frustrations and Pain

PointsLimited time due to daily routine with husband, children

Narrative Jane is a 29 year old mother of three that lives in Portland, OR. Her

daily routine consists of caring for her three children, two elementary

school-age and one infant. She is extremely involved in the children's

lives at school, is the PTA president and volunteers at the daycare co-

op in her neighborhood, which frees her up for a couple of two-hour

workout sessions per week at her local fitness center. When eating

her different meals of the day, she writes down on a notepad what

she ate and later looks up on the internet specific nutritional

information. All this is put into a sort of food journal she has.

Jane Curtis

Jane is a 29 year old mother of three that lives in Portland, OR. Her daily routine consists of caring for her three children, two elementary school-age and one infant.

She is extremely involved in the children's lives at school, is the PTA president and volunteers at the daycare co-op in her neighborhood, which frees her up for a couple of two-hour workout sessions per week at her local fitness center.

When eating her different meals of the day, she writes down on a notepad what she ate and later looks up on the internet specific nutritional information. All this is put into a sort of food journal she has.

Next Stage Design Improvements

• Simplify the smartphone interface with less text, more pictures and less instruction by adding an “Undo” button instead of multiple options and pathways to perform a certain task.

• Add a “vibration” notification function to let users know The Ring has taken a photo correctly or processed a label correctly.

Next Stage Design Improvements

• Create a multi-function button which has a series of specific button-press combinations for the ring that allows the user to perform a variety of tasks just by pushing the right combination of buttons.

• Make styling and sizing of the ring an imperative, don’t leave aesthetics to the last minute.

Next Stage Design Improvements

• Create a process to deal with “orphan entries,” photos that the application finds unrecognizable and do not match with images in the visual-object-recognition database.

• Add “portion input” to the Food Film edit. For example users pointed out while they may take a picture of an entire sandwich they might not eat it all so they want to edit the data generated from the picture of the sandwich.

Conclusion

We found the user testing to be both enlightening and affirming.

• Users loved our product. One user didn’t take the ring off the entire time during the test.

• Users want a much simpler interface.

• Users would use our product and found it viable.