The following is a basic description of one of the
project options available this term.

The general phase 1 rules and hardware rules apply to whichever specific project option you choose.


Kitchen Kompanion App

Imagine that you have a kitchen and refrigerator in your home that many people share, and are looking to use technology to address some organizational concerns. See the hardware rules for details on the course standard smartphone. Note that although your smartphone will have a camera and microphone, we are not being futuristic (no AI or ML) and we are in an HCI course (so the focus cannot be on things that AI or machine learning would do, this is about direct human interactions).

You need to design the user experience for the app, used in or out of the kitchen, paying careful attention to the types of shopping and cooking tasks involved in multiple-person homes (whether a family or a group of students or friends living together). You need to explore the locations where that smartphone app might be used and how, and consider that while "in the kitchen" might be the most common one, there will be others (at work? upstairs in the home? in the grocery store!). This app's purposes include things such as storing and managing the refrigerator's contents, and practical things such as shopping lists, there will certainly be more features.

Consider what interesting issues tied to this context can be explored (dietary preferences, healthy eating, avoiding waste, spoiled food, ingredients for recipes, things stored in a refrigerator versus cabinets, etc).

You will need to find out how users could utilize this type of app as part of your work. During Phase 1, you will want to explore and consider the many different groups of people who might share a home. For Phase 2, you might narrow your interactive prototype elements into a single such living scenario, and your low-fidelity drawings in Phase 1 might as well, but you should start by exploring broadly and then work towards an overall design and set of features that would work across those populations, even though the drawings/prototypes themselves might show a specific one. Similarly, just as you will be considering different group dynamics, you should be considering different dietary ranges as well as cooking and baking skills and desires.

Some example bare-minimum requirements

  • entering information as well as see existing information about what is in the refrigerator
  • entering shopping list information, see existing information about refrigerator contents, and be useful while shopping
  • user personas need to include parents and children and college-aged students at a minimum
  • user personas need to include at least three "levels" of cooking and baking skills and interests
  • it cannot have a keyboard or mouse or any other similar peripheral

    Some thoughts to get you started thinking about other uses (ask the potential users for more ideas, and realize some might say "I wouldn't want one of these.")
  • while users are expected to access the app while shopping or in the kitchen, users might want to access this from other locations in the home rather than going to the kitchen to look inside the refrigerator, and a variety of places to look at or update the shopping list
  • there are a wide variety of potential users, and you should consider mobile app users such as one who does not live in the same place as the refrigerator but cares about those who do or one who doesn't live there but visits often
  • consider different levels of organization and practical needs across things like plain ingredients versus leftover dishes, expiration dates (which can differ from sell-by dates), "person-labeled" food/items (shared refrigerators of many kinds), etc.

    Your prototype needs to be populated with realistic information and needs to address questions such as setup, access, usage, family dynamics, and privacy.

    This page may be updated with additional guidelines within the next few days...












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