Review my Webapp: How to make ______? (food)
recipepuppy.com
recipepuppy.com
Therefore, eliminate the need to pick a dish. Allow your user to select an ingredient, then narrow the list of options for further selections to only those ingredients that are common to dishes containing the selected ingredient.
For example, if you pick tomatoes, then parmesan, you can probably eliminate pickles from the list. Once they've selected the ingredients, then show them the list of dishes.
However:
1. The URL/name is of questionable quality.
2. The pop-up box (which I got on a search results page, presumably because I have cookies disabled) is obnoxious. Get rid of it. No one likes pop-ups. Ever. Regardless why they're there.
3. The search box on the main page is a disappointment compared to the one you linked here. The combination of searching for a generic item (I used tacos) and then narrowing by ingredients is what you have that's brilliant. Play on that.
a
b
cI have removed the pop up box, and I think I will come up with a better domain name for this type of search.
In all seriousness, I think a nice open, fresh design would really help you. Something to really invigorate my appetite. I told you this the last time you posted, but I'll say it again, you might want to make your logo a bit more relevant. Maybe just a puppy's face with a chef's hat or something. The dog by itself isn't really working for me.
I eventually will give in to the design/domain name complaints.
Edit: you may find this useful
It would be more useful to exclude ingredients, rather than choosing which ones to include. Ideally I'd like to immediately see the results with a list of ingredients in a sidebar. I'd then eliminate ingredients I don't have or can't eat (e.g. gluten flour, chocolate, milk), which would filter the recipe list.
I would still like to see a more intuitive filtering interface, but I like the way it works from the home page a lot better.
Thank you for making a website that I never knew I desperately needed.
As for suggestions, I'd suggest pushing your content closer together. Right now your left side is crammed up against your left margin with a gigantic bit of whitespace in the middle before you get to the pictures. Pushing these together would help content flow.
Get rid of the ads, and I think you have a really compelling site.
with cheese
If the Web doesn't attract better quality advertising than those lame-ass belly fat diet ads, then Web advertising in general isn't going to be sustainable.
That said, they are a bit invasive... That might be solved with a redesign you've said you'll probably give in to :)
If I were you I'd get rid of recipepuppy.com/how and go straight to recipepuppy.com. It'd be worth having a few more "example" searches to give an idea what it can do -- it took me a while to figure out how to search for recipes _without_ a given ingredient.
The google ads are a bit too prominent -- they really get in the way. On my screen the results page comes up as mostly ads -- I only see one actual search result until I scroll down. I suggest being a little more restrained with the ads.
You get an Error:
404 File Not Found
Did you mean: eggThe results presentation is confusing in that if I specify 5 ingredients, I should be able to get the recipe with all 5 at the top of the list. In fact I get one that uses 4/5 at the top and the one that uses 5/5 lower.
You have a parsing problem (unavoidable) in that recipes that call for "lemon, juiced" do not turn up as hits on "lemon juice".
To reproduce the above, search for hummous, then tick the following: chickpeas, tahini, cummin, lemon juice, olive oil.
On the plus side: good job - I often do ingredient-based searches (eg on bigoven.com) and this is better that what I have seen elsewhere. Now you need an iPhone app so I can do this easily in the grocery store :-)
Doubleplus grest because it fully works without the need for Javascript and even Cookies, thanks.
I searched for a Pizza Salami, selected about 10 of the top ingredients and got about 6000 results. I then added some of the suggested ingredients and got more results (until I added an obscure one). Shouldn't more ingredients means a smaller set of recipes? Maybe you are using less strict rules (OR instead of AND) for later result pages, otherwise I cannot imagine why this happened. Well, minor observation really. ;-)
Great work! I'll be using this for sure!
But please make the "Find it!" button appear at the top as well, so I don't have to scroll forever.
I would replace "Select the ingriedients you want to use:" with something like "What ingredients do you have in the fridge to make <pasta>?"
Another thing to think about is the color combination. I am no where near an expert, but it could be improved.
My main gripe is that when you get to the ingredients level I would remove the % part as it's a bit hard to read the page as is and have them grouped as "all recipes use:" "most recipes use:" "some use:" "a few use:" and have all and most auto selected and then some and a few are default not selected
From a cook's perspective, it would be nice to have a way to search and refine by cuisine (Chinese, Italian, etc.) and by dish (appetizer, dessert).
Did you use a simple parser to parse ingredients or did you have a corpus of ingredients to parse against (or both)?
Small suggestion: on the results page, I mistook the "Search by Ingredients" field for the "How to make ___" field. It would make more sense to have the "How to make ___" field up there, and the "Search by Ingredients" field somewhere lower down, perhaps under the results summary bar.
I know there were some comments about picking ingredients instead of dishes, but the search for picking a dish then selecting which ingredients you wanted was really good.
People will often know they want to eat a prairie oysters (for example - not that there's anything wrong with that) and not know what to put into the mix. With a list of ingredient (that make up prairie oysters) where people can check off what they like from recipes and get a custom recipe, thats amazing. don't get rid of that.
I dont know which is better, ingredient search or recipe search, but dont ditch the recipe one. for the love of god
Lose the double exclamation marks in your buttons.
It's rather weird having ingredient names rewritten (e.g., I did a search with "creme fraiche" in it and it came back claiming I'd asked for "sour cream") but maybe that's unavoidable.
I searched for burritos - naturally - and it grouped "tortillas," "flour tortillas," and "wheat tortillas" in separate categories, with "flour tortillas" having a larger percentage than just "tortillas." There are probably a few thousand cases where something like this would happen, but you will eventually want to edit it so that you have a more logical ingredient structure and better semantics ("Tortillas:", with subheadings of wheat, flour, etc., for example.) Getting your search results right is going to be a great deal of drudge work, but it will make the app better when you get to that level of refinement.