GARLIKE + USER-FRIENDLY RESEARCH
Our group has decided to make a website named GARLIKE, for garlic enthusiasts that will mainly feature delicious garlic recipes as well as other useful tips. As my role as the instructional designer, this week I have been researching the best way for users to interact with the site. I thought the best way to go about doing this was to look at successful cooking sites and see how they had organized their sites and displayed recipes. The one of the site’s that I liked the most was cooksillustrated.com, it featured a sophisticated, clean design. Here is a link to one of their recipe pages.
cooksillustrated.com
Here are a couple links to other recipe layouts from other sites:
epicurious.com
organicsoul.com
cooking.com
I think we should apply a 2-column layout with the navigation at the top for our site, which a common layout among most of the sites that I researched. The recipes themselves are organized into three main sections. The first lists the name of the dish, it usually has a picture and briefly describes the prep time, cooking time, difficulty of dish and the amount it yields. Another section lists the ingredients and the last section shows the instructions.
Upon researching I found certain features that i like and believe are quite user-friendly such as a print button and shopping list feature following the recipe. Some sites had a “recipe box” option for you to save certain ones and it also listed possible recipes you might like based on the one you chose. Some sites went so far as to include wine pairings and nutrional facts about the recipe.
The most confusing part of the research was seeing how each site organized its navigation for the recipes. Our group has talked about how we would like to divvy up the site. However, I am still working on what I think wil be the most user-friendly navigation.
Anywho, I like how well our team has been working together, we have been doing lots of communication through googlewave. The Garlike site seems to be shaping up to something really good. :]
