New feature: food competition / food olympics

[monsieurtanuki]

I'm in a store, I have 5 different Nutella-like products in front of me, I want to know which one is best for me

That was the initial idea in #334.

The process for the end-user could be something like that:

• the end-user is in a supermarket
• looking for breakfast cereals
• and tons of breakfast cereals can be found, obviously
• click on a "start a food competition!" button
• an obvious "scan the first product" call to action
• when the first product is scanned, a suggestion: "would you like all the similar products to be automatically downloaded?" (with the name of the smaller category, like "muesli with fruits")
• the end-user can also scan other products
• and the food ranking parameters are automatically applied - the products are sorted: that's the goal
• products in this list can be removed (e.g. a Germany-only product that cannot be found in a French shop)
• "food competition" results (a.k.a. product lists) can be saved with a name (potentially the name of the category)

[stephanegigandet]

The way I imagine it is more transparent / integrated to the scan feature.

I scan a first product, I get a product card. Then I am prompted "Scan more products to compare them". And then whenever I want, I can click on a button (I think we have the cup icon now) to see the list of those products ranked according to my preferences.

It's this "Scan and compare products" at the bottom of the proposal I made for the Choose mode a while ago:
https://wiki.openfoodfacts.org/images/2/2e/Unnamed-food-app-design-proposal.1000.png

The download of similar products is too complex I think. We just don't have a way to know which products are available in which stores. Even knowing which products are available in each country is quite difficult.

[monsieurtanuki]

The download of similar products is already implemented: last card on the product page. I understand the problem with filtering out foreign food or other shops' food, but it's not the most important feature and at least it can be helpful to download some items without having to scan everything. We can give the end-user the possibility to remove from the list the products they deem irrelevant.

Regarding the UX, the idea is to think the other way around: an app with an elevator pitch like "Too much choice in the supermarket? Get only the best foods according to your own criteria". Et voilà. The food competition is obviously the main purpose of the app, not something you can do when you're idle.

In opposition to the current version of the app, where we can do this, we can do that, we can add this, we can remove that, but we have no well-defined purpose, except perhaps not being the same as the already existing Android app.

[monsieurtanuki]

I'll work on that issue. Anyway that won't be wasted; for instance the possibility to scan products and to automatically put them in a specific list can be reused elsewhere.

[M123-dev]

@monsieurtanuki I agree with @stephanegigandet, we don't have the possibilities to implement the feature as you suggested although it would be a game changer.
We dont know exactly which products are in which store, in which country and when you compare a large Rewe vs a Rewe To Go of course there is not the same product range.

Also, what if I'm standing in the store and want to see what kind of sweet cereal is the healthiest for me. I will most likely shown me cereals full of dried fruit, even though I prefer to eat my cereal with freshly cut fruits and self mixed with oatmeal.

In the beginning we had the scanner set to reset the scan cards every time the scanner was opend, I don't know when that changed but now the list is saved in storage.
If we change this back again, this would be the best solution in my opinion and also the easiest to implement. Then you can go into the store, see + scan your favorite selection of products, press the fab and see which one is the best for you.

[M123-dev]

@stephanegigandet, the start with the hints sounds great.

3. On the comparison list (when we click on "Compare X products") : offer to name the list.

I dont think we need to implement this as a list feature. My proposal would be when we've got more than one product scanned, a FAB appears which opens the comparison page on which the scanned products are in the correct order depending on the preferences. We dont need to save this list anywhere. When a product is scanned its added to the "temporary" and the recently seen list.

[monsieurtanuki]

How would you start a temporary list?...
We could do something like this...

Not convinced:

• we don't have that much space in the scan page, we already have problems with product cards (cf. Scan card overflow with long texts #340)
• immediate scan is not necessarily the entry point of product comparisons - sometimes I want to compare foods that I scanned 2 weeks ago: "hey I've just found this orange juice, that looks good, let's scan it and compare it to what I discovered last month"
• perhaps using a term like "food comparisons" from the home page would help (while keeping the "standard" scan button): I can add whatever product I want to a food comparison (e.g. from the product page), and once I'm in the food comparison page I have a scan button where every scanned product will automatically be added to that food comparison

[monsieurtanuki]

@M123-dev Hey, I've spent 1 hour scanning breakfast cereals, then 30 minutes scanning orange juice! This cannot be temporary and dismissible. We do need to store those lists, especially given the fact that stay relevant as they don't change that much - as opposed to stock exchange.

[M123-dev]

@monsieurtanuki I have no problem with storeing these lists, it should only be optional that the user can save the list with the 50 cereals but not necessarily, for just three baked pizzas it is not worth it.

[monsieurtanuki]

@M123-dev It's a matter of UX: in my suggestion, creating a food comparison (list) is the first step. Which may lead the end-users to understand what they do.
In your suggestion, the creation of the food comparison is implicit, and its deletion must be explicit.