Hey all,
I've begun laying out the user experience and have a layout for the first form. In total, there will be four panes: "Today's Meals", "Nutrition History", "Recipe Book", "Settings". The user will begin at the "Today's Meals". From there, the user can add food that he has eaten over the course of the day, and view the quality of his nutrition for the day show as a list of progress bars representing the percent daily value consumed of each type of nutrient. One of the later planned features for this page is to allow for recommendations for foods and recipes based upon the remaining unconsumed nutrients that the user needs. For instance if the user has only had 50% daily value of fiber, the app will recommend some type of food which is high in fiber.
Once the user has a few days worth of meal data entered, he can use the "Nutrition History" page to view a chart of his nutritional intake over time. In this way, for instance, the user will be able to see how much cholesterol he has consumed each day over a given period of time. This should help users analyze whether they're dietary options are in fact changing their nutritional intake.
The last pane (settings is pretty self explanatory) is the "Recipe Book" pane. This is where the user can create and store any recipes that he has encountered or made while he has been tracking information. This will be a pane in which the user can make a list of food with the portion size of each, and save it as a recipe which can be easily added into a meal. The nutrition info can be easily estimated based on the nutrition of the ingredients (however, I will need to examine what the usual expectation is for losing nutrients when a food is cooked).
This is a wonderful start, lets take this even further. At every stage make sure to clearly list what data / and parameters you want to collect and display. .. what features you want on the screen. etc.
ReplyDeleteYou also can post and over arching system diagram of the user experience, etc.
And then this will start to help you formulate what you will start to need to put together for you dev environment ... where will the data sit, how will the users access it
Then add some rough sketches of how you are going to visualize the information back the user
A simple post can be screen shots of the user experience in the app you showed me
and what data it gets from the user, what it stores, and what it searches and displays.....
These are just design comments:
ReplyDeletelivestrong.com's plate tracker has an option where you can enter the calories manually. It'd be nice to include this for foods that aren't found through searches.
I really like the recommendation idea. It's something livestrong's site is lacking so I'd play that up in your related work.
allrecipes.com is a great recipe site that also happens to list nutritional info. It'd be awesome if you could link to it to find recommended recipes. Maybe people could mark they're favorite recipes that would pop to the top of the recommended recipes
I wouldn't categorize the meals into breakfast, lunch, dinner. Few people actually eat like that. Too avoid too many categories you might try morning, afternoon, night.