Food Palette
Most recipe sites I come across focus on the ingredients… I always find this strange. Rarely, when I am on the computer (either at work or in the studio), do I know what I have or haven’t got in my cupboards, and rarely are my food desires to do with particular ingredients alone.
Food is far more emotional than that. Our eating habits are usually inspired by moods, circumstance, time, money and less to do with specific ingredients. More often than not I never know what I want to cook, ‘how hungry are you..?, what kind of mood are you in..?, do you want to cook or shall I..?, are you hungry..?’ these are the questions that always preceed my decisions about cooking.
So I sketched a quick prototype interface, based on these types of questions. It’s a way of searching that I would find as far more inspirational and useful. Using sliders, would be quick and intuitive, and enables you to constantly change the parametres easily. Colours in the background could change and intensify as the sliders moved (the colour aspect would need more development… but could become an integral part of mood and taste matching.)
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2 Responses to “Food Palette”
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February 21st, 2007 at 6:16 pm
I just talked about recipe websites with a friend of mine. You are right, going by ingredient can be tedious and I like your approach. The only difficult thing - for me at least - would be to decide on the exact position of the slider. A limit on horizontal positions (say, 5), would probably help indecisive people (but also be less intuitive, I must admit).
February 22nd, 2007 at 3:28 pm
Yep - I intended to have about 5 predefined points along the whole spectrum of the slider, otherwise it would be really difficult to handle from both a user and backend perspective.
As with most forms of searching, the definitions are still relative and limited. Ones definition of ‘no time’ may be very different from another.
But the idea of the slide, instead of button, matrix, input boxes, was so that each input was relative to each other. So you can state that time is the most important element in comparison to flavour and most importantly the user isn’t forced to find a specific value for something that is hard to put a value on. Also cooking is often about the mixing of different ingredients, and although it is now a weak metaphor, this mixing element was what I wanted to play with. If I had more time and were to take this idea further, I’d focus more on this bit.