Conclusion

Our initial project was very large and ambitious, involving several significant aspects including:

• A physical device
• Finding products and navigation around a supermarket-like environment
• Providing user support (tutorials, product comparison, recipes etc).
  

A key challenge emerged; finding a balance between all the features our users would want in this integrated experience and the time we would have to implement them. Therefore, some features were not implemented in the initial prototype, and some were not implemented fully, but sufficient enough for the purpose of illustration.

The redesign improved on many aspects, integrating speech commands to allow quick navigation as well as speeding up performing common tasks such as purchasing eggs and bread.

Evaluating against online/real life shopping
Throughout we have had to consider that the technology would be challenging current conventions and practices, changing the habits of shoppers. Therefore it was important to give significant consideration to what problems were with current methods (for the elderly) and how we could improve on them.

Our technology breaks down the barriers elderly people would have to real-life shopping (feeling tired, not being able to carry everything home etc). However, these challenges were already removed by something already in existence; online shopping.

But current methods of purchasing groceries online are limited in their usability, the arrangement of products is list based and users are often forced to recall rather than recognise. Contrasting with this, our project utilised distributed cognition and recognition by using the same layout as a real super market. Furthermore, we attempted to break down barriers to using technology by making it as simple and intuitive as possible, utilising Terry Wogan in video tutorials, allowing speech input to quickly navigate to products and limiting the number of controls.

But even still, some users enjoyed the social aspect of shopping which is missing from our project, perhaps a good addition would be allowing users to shop together and communicate remotely. Furthermore, shopping through a virtual environment on screen was different and strange to the users, this is something that will always be a problem with new technologies, all we can do is limit it as much as possible and we feel that we have been successful in that respect.