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select options in this field while adding items. Some wished that this field allowed auto suggestion
enabled typing and auto population. We also learned that the location drop-down menu is missing
some important categories like, health and beauty, paper products, cereal, and snack aisle.
Our participants did not have trouble crossing out items on the desktop version of the site, but they
wanted to be able to cross out whole sections. “Edit Shopping List” does not display amounts of
the specific ingredients (although this is shown in the printed shopping list), nor does it allow users
to know which ingredients relate to which recipes. The need to know which ingredient belongs to
which recipe also became important when participants noticed duplicate or similar ingredients.
They also need additional control over amount of ingredient required based on how much they
have in their kitchen.
Finally, we asked the participants, who already use a smartphone, to use the mobile version of
GastroMighty and try out the shopping list feature. While many of the participants appreciated this
additional functionality, they had a hard time figuring out the difference between crossing out items
(showing they had bought them) and removing items from the list altogether. We also found two
important bugs with respect to the mobile site. First, after participants signed into the mobile site
on their mobile device, they were directed to the desktop version of the site, not the mobile
version. Secondly, there was no way for participants to log out of the mobile site. This along with
the “unfinished” appearance of the mobile site left our participants wanting.
Recommendations
We recommend adding “Edit Shopping List”, page to the top navigation bar. Users should not be
required to choose a location when they add ingredients. More importantly, we recommend
showing the amounts of ingredients and allowing users to be able to edit these amounts. It will also
be important to connect each ingredient with the recipe it has. One way to do this would be to
show recipe(s) excerpts when the mouse hovers over the ingredient for a moment. This could also
be addressed by showing the recipes on this page and when the cursor hovers over or clicks on
the recipe, its specific ingredients change color, become highlighted, or have some visual cue for
distinction.
An additional list of recommendations can be found in Appendix F: Additional Recommendations.
4. Search and Filter options need to be optimized
Our usability testing exercise found that both the search feature and the filter options are two areas
that are highly important to users, and GastroMighty could benefit from optimizing both of them in
order to better meet users’ needs. We found that, despite the fact that our tasks did not directly
instruct participants to use the search feature, they turned to it often to find their desired meals. In
fact, overall, participants used the search feature more often than they used the “Suggest More
Recipes” option. Unfortunately, our participants ran into a number of issues when using the search
feature.
Some examples of search errors that participants encountered were that a search for “vegetarian”
returns results that include meat, and the first result in a search for “vegetarian chili” is “vegetarian
pad thai.” Our participants also found that there are spelling errors in GastroMighty’s dictionary. For
instance, see Figure 2.
Usability Testing Report 9