ProjectProposal-JuanCadena
From CS 160 User Interfaces Sp10
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Introduction
After a long and busy work week in the city Friday finally arrives and it’s time to go home, relax, and watch some television. But as you’re driving home from work you remember from the morning your kids complaining about running out of milk for their cereal, so you decide to stop by the supermarket and pick some up. While in the supermarket, you desperately try to remember if there was anything else you needed, but after a period of racking your brain, you pay for the milk and leave. When you arrive home you’re excited to finally take off your shoes and relax but as you’re putting the milk away you notice a list on the table. Immediately you remember. It’s the list your spouse asked you to take to the store with you. So much for relaxing, back to the store you go.
Target User Group
The target user group is comprised of the individuals who carrying out the majority of routine shopping for their family, roommates, clients, etc. Occupational sets of this group would be comprised of stay-at-home parents, college students, social workers, and care takers. These individuals ensure necessary items such as food and toiletries are always available in the household. Since transportation, time, and money is a major concern for these individuals, carrying out this task in an efficient manner is essential.
Problem Description
Most shoppers like to make a list of items they need beforehand to make shopping quicker and more efficient. But a lot of the time shoppers make unexpected stops at the store and do not have the list with them, so they end up forgetting the items they need. Also, some items such as bread, milk, eggs, toothpaste, and toilet paper are purchased in regular intervals and should not have to be manually monitored. Creating an application that allows the user to maintain an automatic and routinely maintained shopping list provides for an efficient and memory-saving shopping experience. Requiring only a single entry of a regularly purchased item, a shopping list application could monitor and automatically include the item on the shopping list when supplies run low, thus, alleviating the need to constantly check cupboards and guessing at the supermarket.
Problem Context and Forces
With the increase in fuel prices, families and individuals continually find themselves searching for ways to minimize their fuel consumption. For those who live in densely populated areas where traffic is an issue or in sparsely populated areas where the nearest city is 30 miles away, conserving fuel becomes a major issue. Another concern is time. When not at work or school, most individuals enjoy utilizing their time for relaxing and other leisurely activities. For some, time is money, to others, time is priceless. Either way, time is one thing no one wants to waste. One major cause of wasteful commuting is the product of inefficient shopping, in particular, having to make repeated trips to the store for “forgotten” items. Many have experienced the grief of returning to the store midway through baking a cake for a bag of sugar or after realizing the last roll of toilet paper is gone and knowing nature hates to be put on pause. Events like these cause us to unnecessarily expend our time and fuel on situations that could have been avoided. A modern solution to this problem is to create a shopping list, but having to make a list with the same items every week or two wastes time and paper. What about the many times we forget the list at home only to find ourselves guessing what we wrote on it? We all know something will be forgotten and someone is going to get stuck having to go back to the store. Such a waste.
Solution Sketch
