Fun+Cooker+Prototype

Matt Orlove Chris Carmel Jen Gorski

[|Fun Cooker] - Functioning Prototype (in order to access, must login with username = "guest" and password = "guest")

Our primary goals for building this prototype were as follows - 1) Have a clearly defined standard design and feel for our website. 2) Make it as VISUALLY user friendly as possible. 3) Ensure our desired usability tests could be performed.

We decided it was important to focus on the visual aspects of the website for this portion of the project. Our standard header found at the top of each page not only keeps consistency, but it also contains the most important features that we wanted the user to focus on - the search bar and navigation bar. These two elements allow users to visit nearly any page on our site with a single click.

We chose simple colors - different shades of blue, white, and black are the most prevalent colors. Our initial design was very colorful and loud, which certainly helped "Fun Cooker" live up to its name but ultimately we decided, for a website designed for college students, it was not exactly a route we wanted to take (please keep in mind this is a very rough design):



We thought about Apple and the trend of their interfaces becoming more dull from their bold predecessors and decided that, with simple being a huge aspect of what we wanted our website to be, it was probably the way to go.

With our basic skeleton and overall design finished, we were faced with our next decision - get our website ready for usability tests. We decided what functions were most important and would be done most often by users. Our usability tests became the following:

1. Create account. 2. Upload recipe. 3. Find a tag and follow it. 4. Find a user and follow them. 5. Find a recipe and add it to your Recipe Book.

We created pages throughout our website that will assist our future usability testers in running through these different tasks. Take test number 3 for example - we will instruct the user to search for the tag "breakfast" and follow it. When "breakfast" is entered into the search bar, a search page will return results for breakfast. Tags will be at the top, followed by any recipes or users that match the criteria. Since our website isn't fully functional yet, we've hardcoded pages that will simulate the user's navigation. Try searching for the recipe "extra appley apple pie" or the user "dessert_diva". We should be able to get a good idea of what works and what doesn't in terms of our website's basic features.

In terms of what needs to be done still for our final submission, there is a lot. The entire functionality of the website needs to be working (we plan on utilizing the tuple service we used for our JavaScript homework), we need to build more recipe and user pages to make new users actually have content to browse, we need to go through and create pages for all the smaller, less used pages (links found in the footer, settings pages, etc), we need to add advanced search options (such as searching specifically by ingredient, recipe, or user, having certain dietary restrictions as search criteria, etc), we need to add the ability for the "enter" key to be pressed to initiate a search, and of course, we'll need to reassess things after our usability tests. Overall, we're on the right track but we will definitely need to spend the next few weeks refining our website - altering some layout problems, changing some background and text colors - basically making it seem like a much more credible and professional website. The better it looks, the more people will be motivated to continue using it and user satisfaction is without a doubt our end goal.