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.