What’s in My Meal? An interface critique of Brown Dining’s Menu website

With Brown changing its meal plan policy to mandate students to stay on it until the end of their sophomore year, I found myself frequently on the website I thought I would only have to use once in a while from sophomore year on: Brown Dining Services’s menu website.

On the bright side, we are lucky that each of our dining halls offer unique, rotating menus. The daily menus for each dining hall are posted on the website one week in advance, allowing students to figure out the best option for themselves. But the website can be optimized further to be a better source of information to students wanting to know more about what’s in their meals.

Website

The Good

The interface itself is quite user friendly, intuitive to use, and efficient. The design choices are minimal, ensuring that the webpage loads quickly, making sure users can get to the information they need. Moreover, common affordances ensure that users are aware of the possible functions of the website: filters, expansions, and additional descriptions.

Users can get to the desired menu using three filters: dining hall, date, and dietary preferences, and an arrow placed next to each category indicates that this is a drop down menu.

Intuitive, eye-catching colored icons next to each menu item indicate whether it is vegetarian, gluten-free, and halal dishes, allowing users to get a sense of which items adhere to their dietary needs without having to select this from the filter at the top, speeding up the checking process. A visual metaphor of an eye is placed next to ‘show descriptions’, a useful feature if students want to know more about the ingredients in a specific dish.

The Bad

So students (myself included) click on the ‘show descriptions’, expecting to see more details about each food item.

Yes, descriptions for several food items are shown in small grey lettering below the name, but most do not have any. There also is an inconsistency in the description of items, with some items listing key ingredients, some listing the origin, and others with vague descriptions such as ‘a variety of toppings’.

Inconsistent food descriptions

It is true that some items are self explanatory, such as ‘blueberry pancakes’, but the designers have unintentionally created a false expectations of function, when users are barely given any more information than they already have in the previous stage.

This is especially true for students wanting more information on calories, allergies, or macronutrients. The FAQ section of the website does explain that allergy information is provided on a case-by-case basis, however very few students have the time to speak to a nutritionist or speak to the dining staff, especially when they have common allergies.

The most counterintuitive thing, however, was the fact that a separate page containing all this nutritional information existed (with common allergies too!), hyperlinked in a hard-to-find section of the menu page.

The only hyperlink to the detailed nutritions content is located inn a separate section of the website, making the information hard to access.

Students are redirected to a detailed nutrition website. This is a section that can’t be found with a conventional google search.

All the information found in a conventional nutrition label is found here

Highly detailed system of filters is also available for students with allergies

The Solution

For the busy students at Brown, checking this by themselves would be much more efficient than the other options, but the website design makes it difficult for them to do so. While it could be distracting to fully integrate the two websites, the menu website can benefit from making the nutrition website more accessible.

Students will be able to conveniently access additional information through the hyperlink

One way to do this is to add a hyperlink to the nutritional information and list out already existing allergy information of each dish in the descriptions section of the menu. Not only will this make the descriptions more consistent, but allow students to easily access nutritional information when needed.