mypantry

Phase II: Refining interaction and designing wireframes

Introduction

MyPantry is a web app currently in development with the main goal of helping users find recipes based on ingredients they already have at home. In this second report, we the UX team (Todd Lange, Ethan Nguyen, and Dylan Wright) will provide insight into the progress of our early stages of interface design.

Methods

The main method we used to evaluate our wireframes was feedback from a cognitive walkthrough conducted on our design by peers. Informal user feedback given to our software engineering team also proved useful in informing the direction of our design.

The cognitive walkthrough is designed to determine whether or not our product is learnable. It can also show step-by-step the process a user would go through to achieve a particular goal, and whether or not the steps the users need to take are clear and show progress towards their goal.

For informal user feedback, our software engineering team presented the early stages of their progress in front of peers. Feedback given from the audience helped highlight areas in which our app could improve.

Findings

All of the cognitive walkthroughs were completed successfully and most were reported as having been completed smoothly. There was one exception to this, as one of the scenarios was outside the scope that we had been taking the project without realizing it.

• The current iteration of our wireframes allowed users to successfully complete their goals consistently. It seemed clear to those that performed the cognitive walkthroughs what they should do next at each step, and it was obvious that progress was being made to their goal. In other words, the users’ mental models matched our conceptual model.
• The breadth of features covered in our scenarios did not align with the direction we have been taking our product. More specifically, labeling ingredients to belong to a specific person was not included in our wireframes as we had decided on taking the designs in a different direction.

From the informal user feedback given to the software engineering team, feedback was mostly positive; there were no issues with what we had, but plenty of suggestions on what we could add. The general response to the current state of the app was that it was not featured enough and didn’t stand out against other competing services. Some proposed features were:

• A food diary to keep track of what the user has consumed. The user would be able to log their reaction to recipes (whether it tasted good or bad, allergic reactions, etc,) the time they consumed it, and whether they’d like to publish their review of the recipe.
• Derived from the food diary above, a potential allergen tracker to extrapolate reactions to recipes, determine common ingredients and alert the user to potential allergies to ingredients.

Conclusions

We have concluded that although the current design of our product is straightforward, we needed to clarify the scope of our product; our personas and scenarios were updated accordingly. We have removed “Trey’s Roommate Situation” as we felt that labeling ingredients by roommate fell outside the user needs for our app.

Furthermore, there were a few features that MyPantry can move in the direction of. From the advice of the software engineering team, we created wireframes for the food diary feature that they were planning on implementing. We updated Trey’s persona and his scenario “Stomach vs. Trey” to better reflect a need for this new feature.

Lastly, we also added wireframes for the feature of a “Grocery List”, where users would see all missing ingredients in their pantry after they selected certain recipes. We believe that this feature, in addition to the food diary, will differentiate MyPantry from our competitors.

Caveats

While we believe that our wireframes and early designs are making great progress, there are a few caveats to note. While the cognitive walkthrough was completed successfully, it was performed by our peers with the assumption that our peers would successfully embody our scenarios. Even though our peers had not seen our product until the cognitive walkthrough session, they still might not be representative of the average new user. There may be flaws in our early design that went overlooked.

Another flaw was that a good portion of our wireframes (the grocery list and food diary features) were created after our cognitive walkthrough and as such we have not gotten external feedback on their designs. These wireframes are more susceptible to design flaws.