Directed Storytelling

Our directed storytelling resulted in the following main concepts:

  • Our users often made the same thing over and over because it was known.
  • Valued photographs in recipes.
  • Often made something with whatever was on hand.
  • Often ran into an issue of not having the proper utensils or cooking implements to prepare food for themselves.

Competative Evaluation

Below research from two of the main recipe websites.

Allrecipes.com

The site is really confusing and cluttered but there are two main ways to get at a recipe: browse and search. Each of those is broken into further categories. Here is a quick outline of the options:

Search

  • Recipe Quick Search (Straight keywords search)
  • Search by Ingredients (Ingredients I want / Ingredients I don’t want)
  • Search by Cooking Time (Ready in X minutes or less)

Browse

  • Recipe Index
  • Specialized Recipe Collections
  • More Recipes Like This

It’s interesting to think about ingredient search in terms of want/don’t want. I had been previously thinking of only “want”. Once you get to the recipe pages the features are:

Print: 3×5, 4×6, Full Page
Email: To a friend, Send an eCard
Recipe Box: Various recipe box features
Shopping List: Add to list, View list
Customize this Recipe: Change number of servings and convert measurements

For us I think the most interesting ones to note are changing the number of servings—that could be key for a beginning cook. So many recipes are for whole families and our user will probably be making for a smaller amount of people. Large recipes could be intimidating and expensive.

Epicourious.com

This site has the same sort of features, nothing too fancy or different. One interesting thing is they allow you to send the recipe to your cell phone so you have the ingredients with you when you’re shopping. Interesting—those SMS is 160 or so characters, is that feasible?

Brick and Mortor

Brick and mortar observation was a less emphasized portion of our research as many of our interviewees simply searched online for their recipes. The few that used an actual book of recipes always went to the book with a specific item in mind, like a recipe they knew was there.