GroupBrainstorm-Group:Epileptic Eels
From CS 160 User Interfaces Sp10
Contents |
Team Members
- BANESH,DIVYA
- FINCH,ANDREW ALBERT
- KOVACS,ARPAD Q
- NGUYEN,DANIEL TIN
- KHALILNAJI,SABA
Brainstorming and Idea Selection
After our group met and exchanged contact information in class, the sparks began to fly in no time! We were able to generate about 56 ideas during the meeting. On the second meeting we decided to process our raw list. Ideas were categorized, descriptions were given for most of the list, and ideas were expanded! Thus we began to narrow our choices. We wrote "NO" next to the applications we denied with their various reasons on the side. Through this long process we were able to decide that we wanted to pick between two categories:sports-training orientated or barcode use.
| This is the original list of ideas we wrote down in class | This is an expanded list with more descriptions and decisions |
|---|---|
|
BC = barcode related |
Sports themed
NO 7. golf app - difficult implementation
NO 13. Small business helper - not really applicable
YES' 22. allergy shopper (using barcode, check if item has allergic items) (BC) - needs to be really reliable, barcode scan, yes or no to eating
NO 24. library inventory checker (BC) - feature of 15
NO 34. earthquake detector - background app, not enough phones
NO 36. good hiking/biking trails - can do in browser
NO 50. blink detector for camera
NO 57. museum audio tour - already exists
NO 59. museum more art info - image recognition, google use
NO 61. wifi strength finder - less promising than cell phone strength
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The final four choices boiled down to:
- ski-buddy locater which used GPS and the accelerometer to show you where your friends were on the slopes and give you information about your ride like speed and etc
- a golf/shot put training app where the iPhone is on your arm-band and help you train by showing you information about your swing or throw.
- a barcode scanner for books showing you local libraries with it in stock, or relatively cheaper alternatives online
- a barcode scanner for food, where the user makes a profile of their allergies and the app basically gives you a red-light or green-light if you can eat it or not
We ruled out the ski application because it required multiple iPhones which we do not have access to. We then decided to have a vote and were able to cancel out the book scanner and consolidate the training app to the shotput application because we all knew nothing about golf. Our final decision lead to the barcode scanner because it was unique. No other application exists that matches it, the target user group is very concise, and it seems more reasonable to have this capability on an iPhone as opposed to a sports trainer.
Target Users
The target user group consists of people who possess allergic reactions to certain food products such as nuts, fish, dairy products, eggs, or wheat products. Unlike most consumers, members of this group must rigorously check every ingredient in their food purchases, to avoid adverse reactions that may lead to hospitalization or even death. These people want a quick, convenient, and accurate way to discover if the product they are purchasing contains any ingredients that could affect their well-being. In particular, users of this application would like to avoid the tedious and time-consuming process of manually looking up each ingredient of every item they are considering for purchase. They would also like to avoid potentially fatal mistakes due to mis-recognition of the often undecipherable and possibly dangerous additives and preservatives that are pervasive in modern processed food products.
Problem Description and Context
Today, an estimated four percent of all adults and six percent of all children in the United States have some form of food allergy, and these fractions are increasing each year. Grocery shopping is a tedious process for food allergy sufferers, as they must carefully and religiously read through ingredient lists in order to ensure the safety of the products they buy. A repetitive process like this calls for electronic assistance. Recently, we have seen a handful of mobile phone applications that take advantage of bar-code reading software for scanning and looking up information about products in stores. This functionality could be applied to an iPhone application that could scan a grocery product, check its ingredients against a list of the user's known allergens, and give the user a "red-light/green-light" indication about the product.
Why Mobile?
The technology of an iPhone and mobile applications are particularly good for addressing this problem due to the portability and features of the device. Allergies are an ever present issue for those who have them, and the portability of a mobile device such as the iPhone provides a quickly accessible medium by which to verify the compatibility of foods and present allergies. Having a mobile application that quickly tells the user whether or not a food item contains dangerous allergens can help make shopping for food much easier and quicker. In addition, making use of the iPhone’s camera, wifi, and other features will most likely make the application faster by reducing the size, and thus load time, of the application through use of an internet database as well as using peripheral devices such as the camera for quick analysis of foods.
Solution Sketches
