Our mental model for the seasonal recipe app is helping people use the best ingredients for any particular time of year is the goal for our little demo search app. Since a lot of people in Norway actually go into the nature and forage, fetch, pick, shoot and fish their own food, we wanted to divide into some of the most typical and normal places where you can find those types of food. We then have two variables for our search: Place where you find the food and Time of year (Month).

Tapping into the mental model

Each variable combination will do an OR-search containing a lot of ingredients for that particular place and time of year. Our relevancy model so far:

1. Recipes with the highest amount of ingredients hits
2. Newest recipes
3. Recipes written by Christopher Sjuve

Number one on the list is given, but why number two and three? A lot of the older recipes doesn’t stand the test of time, and we know we trust Christopher Sjuve’s recipes.

The places we’ve chosen:

1. The sea
2. The farm
3. The garden
4. The forest
5. The mountain

It’s an odd bunch of places, but so far we think it will work. Logs and usability testing will tell us later if we’re hitting the target or not. The farm doesn’t fit that well with the others, since you don’t normally enter a farm and steal a cow or some potatoes. But it will be what’s closest in content to your average supermarket, and will be the default choice. Almost all of the places will have some overlapping ingredients. Each search is a combination of a place and a month. 5 places x 12 months means a sprite of 60 images where you swipe horizontal to select a place. Month will be selected for you, but to open up for exploration we think it will be valuable to  have a vertical swipe to select month.

Here’s the first wireframes on the UX concept.

First version of the query matrix. So far not organized by places, but types of ingredients.

The search is already up and running, but lack every sign of graphical user interface.

Thanks to Qbox.io for letting us use a Hosted Elasticsearch instance for this project!

Sounds nice? This is work in progress, so check back every now and then for new blog posts.