Pantry pal is an application to assist it’s users in keeping track of grocery items they have purchased, knowing when those items expire, allowing users to find recipes that use the items they currently have, and creating grocery lists within the application. In doing these things for it’s users, PantryPal will help reduce food waste and cut down on grocery costs.
When doing research for Pantry Pals, we performed multiple different research methods to get a better idea about what similar applications have done and what we can improve on. The first part of research we did was competitive analysis, where we looked at a few different applications and noted what their strengths were and what we could improve upon in order to compete with them. Collectively, the UX team selected 5 competitors, each with varying features. Each of the competitors were evaluated in the following categories: strengths, weaknesses, Quality, and Price. The two additional categories of platform and Features were also evaluated, but did not contribute as heavily to the overall analysis of the products.
Another research method we used was heuristic evaluation. The UX team chose one competitor that competitive analysis was performed on and looked at it more in depth. The point of heuristic analysis is to see how the app controls, how it looks, how much freedom the users have, and how much the app prevents errors. “My Pantry Tracker ‘’ was the application chosen to evaluate, as it was the one that seemed to be well developed and also most similar to initial concepts of the PantryPal product. “My Pantry Tracker’’ was evaluated and given a score between 1 and 10 in the categories of Visibility of System Status, Match between system and the real world, User control and freedom, Consistency and standards, Error prevention, Recognition rather than recall, Flexibility and efficiency of use, Aesthetic and minimalist design, Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors, and Help and documentation. Notes were taken on strengths and weaknesses in each of those areas.
The creation of personas allowed UX users to gain an understanding of how users may interact with the PantryPal application. We created users and gave them detailed backstories, personalities and goals. For each persona, the UX team created a situation in which the individual would use or need to use PantryPal or a similar application.
Through competitive analysis, our UX team found that the demographic of individuals who may use our product was very broad. Individuals who may have the most interest in using the PantryPal application include particularly busy people, like students or parents. Analyzing other, similar products also revealed that users of PantryPal may also like a cross-platform application.
Findings from heuristic evaluation found that “My Pantry Tracker” was very “average” in almost every category. In the categories of visibility of system status, matching between the system and the real world, user freedom, and flexibility, it ranked 6’s. In the categories of consistency. Recognition, and help and documentation, it ranked 7’s. Lastly, the categories of error prevention, error recovery and aesthetic and design ranked 2’s. With these scores, the UX team found that “My Pantry Tracker” does a passable job in every category involving functionality and consistency, doing exactly what it needs to do and nothing else. Meanwhile, it does a pretty bad job in aesthetics and preventing users from making mistakes, having a boring design and no way of preventing users from accidentally deleting items from the pantry.
Personas and scenarios allowed us insight on why customers would use our app, which in turn gives insights as to what features they would use and what usability topics are important to their personal experience. The creation of personas and scenarios reinforced findings in other analysis methods, specifically that the majority of our users will likely be busy individuals that prioritize a very simple design over other features.
The UX team discovered that with the most likely demographic of users being people with busy workloads, it would be a good idea to appeal to that demographic more. This means that the features within the app should be minimal and require as little effort from the user as possible. This might mean auto-populated fields (like from databases or an API) or meaningful defaults for certain fields and actions. After creating some personas and scenarios surrounding them, the UX team thought of some more features to add to appeal to this demographic like notifications for when food goes bad, having the app adding an expiration date on food based on common items and suggesting a recipe based on the food in the user’s pantry. Based on the heuristic evaluation, the UX team has determined that better error tolerance should also be implemented, such as a confirmation when a user deletes an item.
Some caveats our UX team recognizes are that we have no actual user data yet and that the members of our UX team have little experience in this field and this is the first time we have performed the methods of evaluations that we used. Additionally, it was difficult to narrow down the scope of who may use our product, so a broad range of users makes it difficult to have a deep understanding of how our users may want to use our product.