Pantry pal is an application to assist its 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 its users, PantryPal will help reduce food waste and cut down on grocery costs. This phase focused largely on integrating expiration date functionality and adding features that optimized the usage of the application, like moving items directly between the pantry and cart.
In this phase, we used Cognitive Walkthrough as a research method. The current set of Wireframes, along with the scenarios developed in Phase 1, were posted to other UX Student Evaluators. Different UX Student Evaluators volunteered to evaluate one of the three related scenarios. The UX evaluator was tasked with listing each step the Persona would take to complete the task given in the scenario using the information and available actions detailed in the wireframes. For each step, the UX evaluator answered two questions: Will the user know what to do at this step? And, If the user does the right thing, will the user know that they did the right thing and is making progress toward the goal? The UX evaluators submitted their list of steps with answers to both of these questions for each step to the PantryPal UX team for review.
The results of the Cognitive walkthrough allowed the PantryPal UX researchers to understand what tasks users may have difficulty completing, and helped highlight incomplete functionalities within the application. All UX evaluators were able to complete the assigned tasks, although some had more difficulty doing so than others. We found that some tasks match the capabilities of the application well, such as adding items to the grocery list or pantry. The Cognitive walkthrough also revealed that the application was missing the ability to delete or remove items, quickly transfer items between the pantry and list, and set a specific quantity of items when adding them to the pantry or list. Additionally, it was discovered that users would expect to have the functionality to ‘sort’ their Grocery List and Pantry items not just by name or date added, but by any category. Our research found that not having these capabilities within the application may lead to frustrated users.
Based on the feedback from the cognitive walkthroughs, the UX team updated the wireframes to include features that address problems the evaluators had. This included moving the “add” button to the top of the screen, adding a button to add an item from the grocery list to the pantry, adding a button to add an item from the pantry to the grocery list, and adding a quantity field when adding an item to both the pantry and grocery list so users have a better idea about how much of something they had or needed. It is planned to include the ability to sort items based on several different factors in future phases, this will help users find the item or items they are looking for more efficiently. The addition of these features will make the use of the PantryPal application more efficient, give the user more control over how they interact with the application, and help to record a more accurate description of the user’s pantry.
The research method, Cognitive Walkthrough, was not performed by professionals, but by other UX students who may not have experience performing walkthroughs of this type. Additionally, at the time of the Cognitive Walkthrough, the set of wireframes that the walkthrough was done with could have been a more complete set, they were missing many pop-up dialogues and overall could have been more complete than they were.