A social food application, EatNavi, was designed centering around a textfree format through icon indexing to improve overall user experience in obtaining useful information. Current mobile Internet connections of smart phones has enabled reviewers to easily share their opinions. Users have access to a massive amount of reviews at their disposal to search through for useful information to those that are irrelevant. However, people's food choices are not always driven by the parameters of ambiance, service, cost, or food genre. Keyword queries from informal text-formatted reviews of existing social food application face issues of quality of content and linguistic readability, especially for more abstract concepts like tastes.
EatNavi is a graphical social food application using icon-indexing of information tagged on photos to create a more reliable food review and recommendation. The system allows users to search view reviews and recommendations through taste as well as means to display their own taste preference. After two rounds of testing and one beta testing of the application, EatNavi was measured by readability and relevance of the information. The results of the evaluation demonstrated an improved method of extracting taste-centric information through the designed taste icons and taste ratings interface.

修士学位論文. 2011年度メディアデザイン学 第180号