ProjectProposal-AlexYim
From CS 160 Fall 2008
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Target User Group
The product that I intend to make is essentially an advanced diet journal. It will be your personal diet and workout analyst. The target user group is theoretically anyone who is unsatisfied with the fitness level of their body. I will be developing on the iPhone platform, and the target user group will further be refined to 20-45 year old, college-educated adults. Most of these users don’t have the patience or necessarily the time to track the progress of their health, and their attention span is easily distracted by the many other apps that exist in the iPhone.
Problem Description
The application (referred to as Enshape from now on) is all about making it easier for people to become fit and to reach their health goals. A lot of nutritional information about food is scattered and disorganized. Often, in order to reach your fitness goals, many people would have to spend a lot of time researching and spending time looking up all the food facts and workout information. And all of this takes place in addition to the exercising and dieting, which is the truly the hard part of keeping in shape. Enshape aims to provide an online diet journal for you to keep track of everything you eat, and it aims to analyze the data and present it to you in a meaningful way. The most revolutionary idea is that it is truly mobile, so that you can log what you eat while you are out waiting for your food in restaurants, while eating, or just after eating.
To summarize, the main problem is that people nowadays have to spend a lot of effort to get in shape. In addition to exercising and dieting, they need to learn about food nutrition and health. For serious dieters, there is no easy way to count calories whether their goal is to gain or lose weight.
Problem Context and Forces
An iPhone app should be as responsive as possible. People can be physically moving, on the go, so they need to be able to do what they want to do quickly and easily. This application for the purposes should not need to have a constant Internet connection, but rather be able to connect to the database server from time to time. The user interface needs to be designed to be as smooth as possible, since logging your food intake is a menial task, and any additional hurdles would make it highly impractical to do. Although the user group would most likely to be well-educated, their possible lack of time forces us to require them to learn as little as possible. As a result, we will study the standard iPhone applications that come bundled with the phone and try to replicate the buttons, menu items that people have already learned.
Solution Sketch
