This week, I finally created a few hypothesis that I wanted to begin to explore in a deeper level and also still try to see them through a theory len se such as Information Foraging. The hypothesis I created were…

• H0: If there were less distractions centered on the page or before the nutrition info, people would fixate more time on nutritional info than they usually would when deciding to get an item or not… distractions include similar products, ads, delivery type
• H1: If people see more quantifiable information, they are more likely to choose healthier options… so present nutrition info as just a quantity rather than a percent or label
• H2: If food is presented as a visual narrative, people are more likely to make faster decisions and more accurate decisions for their diet type

While I needed to re-evaluate how to start this grant and decide a direction we want to begin in, I was also responsible for the individual food item mapping to help the team who will begin the data modeling. In order to do this, I had to take the 25 most common foods that people buy, and locate their long food code description and their food code in FNDDS and Standard Reference databases provided by USDA. After I did an initial mapping, I had to do it again because there were some errors in my mapping after the nutritional team checked my work.

This week things became complicated because the FINs project is a 3 year proposal that includes a lot of components such as enthograpghic data, the actual application, data modeling, nutritional information, community ties, etc. However, being apart of the technical team of the project, I am doing the HCI work, but we did not pay attention to the many aspects we would need to begin this proposal. So, we needed to scope the project beefore going further ahead with the narratives. Other things we needed to consider were how to present nutrtional information in an easier way for consumers to compare it to other items, how can we include theories such as information foraging or Maslow’s hierarchy to understand how people shop for groceries, and do we need an actual visual narrative to present food information or does the current models suffice as long as we change the order of items on the page. So, this week I need to take a step back and reevaluate how we want want to actually begin this grant.

This week we wanted to build some prototype webpages to present different types of narratives, so I used Figma in attempt to create these narratives. However, I ran into the problem that Figma does not give a scrolling option for desktop, so instead I decided to just draw out the narratives on my Ipad. I also went back through papers examining what type of surveys and lab-study we would like to run when we are ready to experiment this. I also already had my IRB certification done at my past intitution, but I still was requrired to do an extra module since I go to Notre Dame. So, I got that done since we were getting to an experiment talk.

This week we wanted to begin designing the visual narratives or at least a first go at some examples to discuss. So, I decided to add specific visualization qualities to every example such as bold text for all allergens in Ingredient list and I wrote down some design ideas to create a partition poster, and a slidshow to represent a food item. However, I was very unfamiliar with visual narratives, so Dr. Metoyer pointed me in the right direction to find them.

This week out our meeting, we discussed many ways to create a design guideline of how we should represent food data to consumers. We discussed interactive measures we could take and visualization genres we could follow. In the end, we decided I would create 4 drawings this week, two witin the genre of a slideshow, one interactive and one static. The other two would be seen as a partition poster, one interactive and one static. Then, next week we will decide which is the best option to use for our human study. Also, we have to discuss how we want to do the study whether that be through an eye tracker or think aloud interviews.

This week I needed to finish the online grocer survey; however, I needed to update the attribute list since 30 is way too many. So I made 4 categories to narrow down the attributes. The categories were Nutrient Information, Quantifiable Information, Other Products, and Extra where extra included attributes I thought were noticeable enough to mention such as when pages had directions, recipes, and alternate payment options. I also started to come up with some ideas to move onto the design space characterization that is scheduled to start next week.

In the third week of the Fins project, I started a survey of what information online grocers give consumers about products. I decided to show this survey through Google Sheets. I looked up all major online grocers that span across the United States, so we had a diverse selection since every region has different stores. We decided on 14 different stores, then we had about 30 different attributes to represent what each page provided the consumer. In order to get a full understanding of what each store provided, I checked 8 items that represent 8 major food groups upon each store. These 8 groups included produce, meat, canned goods, sweets, beverages, dairy, grains, and snacked foods.

In the second week of Fins, I did a more extensive literature review of how food information is currently communicated, and also read a bunch of papers to understand more about how information visualization since we want our new design guidelines to be a food narrative. We also talked about different ways we wanted to survey current online grocers.

In the first week of Fins, Dr. Metoyer helped me set up everything tgo have access to all of the current material to the FINs project. We aslo created a schedule for the summer project. I then did a literature review of how food information is currently communicated.