Goals and Requirements
The requirements presentation by Eric St. Onge last week helped me break my thesis thinking slump and take the idea of my project, Food for Thought, from a narrow, simple functionality and expanded the scope of the project in order to consider better ways to encourage behavior change. I may very well end up back in the same place, but before that happens I wanted to be sure to think about a number of variations before final refinement.
I’ve created this list of high-level goals for the project, and determined a list of requirements that a mobile application would require to achieve these goals. It isn’t quite a simplified developer’s dream spec yet, but the exercise helped me consider new directions for the project. (View this list as a PDF)
My pitch remains the same at this point:
Food for Thought is a mobile application that addresses the widespread misunderstandings of food consumption by providing healthy recommendations and a system for tracking nutrition changes that can consciously effect improvements in personal diet regimens.
And I’m reconsidering some other reasons for what this project should achieve.
Why am I making this?
By adopting healthy choices into your lifestyle, problems such as obesity, poor diet, inactivity, and a host of other medical problems can be avoided. We can reverse the trend of obesity specifically by making better food decisions, by passing that lifestyle on to the next generation, and by using our buying power to tell policy makers that our food and our health is important.
Why would someone use it?
- We need tools! Information is important, but not usually sufficient, to motivate lasting changes in diet and lifestyle
- There’s and all or nothing mentality. We are bombarded with specific recommendations for healthy eating and guilt which can result in the “What the Hell” effect (I’m pressed for time and need a quick lunch…might as well get McDonalds…what the hell, I’ll Supersize it!)
- We can trade in our illusions of becoming perfectly healthy for something much more fun: being “pretty healthy”
- As a species, we are much better at small changes than big ones, but the experience of small successes tends to inspire us toward even greater improvement
- Because we need to be reminded that good nutrition is mostly common sense
- Reminders of behavioral changes make it harder to mindlessly overindulge: no reminders = no consistent tracking = no awareness = no behavioral change
- It’s easy. A decent method you follow is better than a perfect method you quit
- There are four principles of failure-proofing behavior: 1. Make it conscious. 2. Make it a game. 3. Make it competitive. 4. Make it small and temporary. (Timothy Ferriss)
The feedback I am requesting in class today will include the following questions to the group:
- Opinions on new list of goals and requirements for the project
- Discuss possibility of expanding or narrowing the options I’d like to include in the mobile application, and whether to incorporate a more comprehensive web-based goal-setter as well?
- Additional thoughts on meaningful prototypes?
