anandgrafiti

Quick and dirty, you see! It's an experiment.

Ha! You have just suggested a terrific feature. I have no idea how we could implement something like that even with the parsing logic. I mean, we see way too many writing patterns on a restricted ingredient entry area itself. So imagining the multitude of edge cases makes my head spin:)

But will definitely give it a shot. We had something like this planned early on, but were too scared to try it out. And yes, we have been improving a lot on the site, please do come frequently:)

A long pending complaint. Been keeping it to the backburner for a while. SOrry about that. The auto loading stops after a while and becomes user triggered.

Meanwhile here is the link you were looking for http://cucumbertown.com/humans

I guess the use case you mentioned is more to adding variations like an alternate ingredient, or a tip to a step or something like alternative to what is suggested in the original recipe.

We have a wish list in our mind where we can add structured annotations (tips/alt ingredient/photo) to the original literature and have a repository of such stuff residing on top of the original recipe itself.

This way it can become a far more richer data, set in the original context and offer mutual learning to all.

Thoughts?

I get what you are saying. This is something we are yet to explore. The freeform content editable input mechanism that we use currently is far from perfect with several browser quirks. Added to the common use cases of selection, moving the caret with keyboard etc, it becomes tad more tedius. But it is something we are planning to invest more time on. Thanks a ton for the feedback.

Sorry about that, We took a calculated call with the editor. For the consumer, a structured tabular view of ingredients make sense but for the author, the structured way of entering it in tables becomes a chore. This is the main problem with creating good recipes. So we try to hit a sweet spot, and bring up a bit of that desired structure the way we parse the ingredients.

The writer is learning continuously with more people using it, and we correcting the imperfections as we spot them. There is no end to the ways in which people may enter ingredients. Our bet is, once the user get to see how it is presented on the final output, the second time they will start visualising the way it needs to be entered. A bit of mutual learning. Meanwhile, we keep looking for patterns and keep correcting these rough edges.

Also there are tons of use cases that we try to solve here. For instance, people who have recipes stored on their personal Onenote/Evernotes accounts or blogs can simply copy/paste the ingredients and steps to the free form editor.This would not have been possible in a structured form.

http://raymondsfood.cucumbertown.com/ recreated around 100 recipes from his blog over a weekend using the editor! Sure, it could still render buggy, but it is possible to iron out the bugs with more data coming in and patterns detected.

There are far more variables here to measure. First of all what constitutes that fifty you are thinking of rolling out? Lets say you arrive at it and what's next? For an engaged user the AB testing can measure up as you can define clear set of tasks and desired outcomes. But as i stated above, good type often goes invisible. People engage with the content and the not the,medium to tell you anything tangible. One cannot take away the subjectivity from the process when there is not anything tangible to measure.

True, you should not think of your redesign/design thinking about type. That will be a disaster. But somewhere along the way you need to start looking into the options available and the personality you want to deliver though your designs.

Psst! I never get people's hatred for comic sans..its a typeface designed for a purpose. Now its not anyones mistake that Microsoft started packaging it with the OS and the HR departments of the corporate world thought of it as cool to use to be friendly in communication:P

Good typography is often invisible. I clearly feel far more elegance with the original typefaces:) Its a subtle thing, something that cannot be quantified. Ofcource, content is the king, but in a world where everyone can create good content, how well will you present your content will be key.

Precisely the reason for attempting to chronicle the journey. Thanks for your interest. Its not very common to come across documentation of subtle aspects of design decisions like type choices.

Ofcource i cant claim that the sampling group was big enough for us to make a generic judgement. But for the record, we had 10 users testing it in realtime cooking environments and several others we follow closely at our curated community at facebook. What you claim as common typographic sense is not common to everyone, even in the world of design. People follow patterns and those patterns may or may not work for you in your projects. Assumptions are one thing, but validation is another. In a world where everything needs a reasoning, some process is required for answering questions like why this or why not that..

Thanks for the comments. But the web and the resolutions are changing. The web is the new Print. Take a look at projects like Medium or Flipboard... they all strikes you as impressive not just because of the beautiful layouts but with the intelligent choice of typefaces. Try turning off the webfonts on Medium and see if the impact remain the same? The general design trend moves towards bigger fonts and lavish use of while space on the web. Which means, you need better typefaces to make your designs stand out. With better font rendering engines, its a reality now.

We did. Infact the specimen sheets were tested with random users in their cooking environment and the reading patterns were analysed. We noticed that line heights needs to be liberal and open counter letter forms fare better in such scenarios. Again, these are pure observation based conclusions and the same fonts when tested with improved type settings have been reviewed well by the users.