Prototyping a Mobile App to Support Food Sharing Between Remote Families

Our Project

Individuals have difficulty maintaining healthy habits and families can provide this support for each other, but distance makes this interchange more challenging. In this paper, we prototype Cooking Stories, a mobile application designed both to support sharing food experiences between remote families and to encourage continued food sharing in person. Cooking Stories focused on two features: connecting individuals with recipes that meet their dietary needs, and helping individuals share their experiences cooking with remote family and friends. We conducted IRB approved usability testing on a medium fidelity prototype with five participants. Most the participants felt that the app addressed their information sharing needs. We then examine Cooking Stories’ potential to help distanced families share food experiences. In addition, we discuss how the takeaways from our prototyping process and usability feedback can inform best practices for Health Informatics systems promoting health eating, specifically in family contexts.

Big Points

• Analyzed past work to establish major design principles for our prototype
  
• Created low, medium, and high fidelity interactive prototypes
  
• Conducted IRB approved usability testing on our medium fidelity prototype with 5 individuals recruited online
  
• Established major points of improvement based on testing feedback