First thing first: I really like search as a technology. Not so much because how it helps us today, but how it can help us tomorrow. Especially on the UX front, stuff moves slowly. One of the biggest issues, in my mind, is the empty search box. That’s why I tend to look for solutions [...]
Great day, our seasonal food recipe search app, or just “Recipe app” for short, is in public beta… or maybe only a late alpha release. Anyway, it’s mature enough so you can get an idea of how it will look and work. Seeing others use it, I’m inclined to call it a recipe discovery engine. [...]
Once the design for the seasonal recipes app started coming into place, we soon saw there was something fishy about the results. Elasticsearch and custom relevancy to the rescue!
Our seasonal food recipe app is getting closer to some front end hacking. Just finished making a navigation sprite where you’re supposed to swipe horizontal to change place of food foraging, and vertical to change time of year (month). It’s based on our earlier created mental model and Christine Hørven’s interpretation. When you open the web [...]
More than half the traffic for the recipe site we’re indexing comes from Ipads and Android Tablets. Because of this we’ve chosen to do pad first, mobile second and regular laptop/desktop third. So first up are Ipads and Android Tablets. Recipe App User Experience on Ipads and Androids How to sort the result set The [...]
Earlier, I’ve looked into how I could use the Phi spiral to possibly get a better display of what’s most relevant in a search result. A former colleague of mine, Johannes Hoff Holmedahl, did a quick test on the theory, and it may actually work. For the recipe app I want to do something slightly [...]
Using search templates simplifies the life of the client searcher. Now she can have an elasticsearch query DSL expert create search templates for him, hiding away all the ugly booleans, weightings, facets and what have you, while she relaxes in his armchair emitting simple searches for ‘beetroot’ or any other favourite vegetable, fish, meats, dairy, or [...]
Although the concepts and sketches for the recipe app are the absolute best of the best, we were unfortunately forced to realize that an actual search solution must take the step down from the platonic world of pure ideas and into the hideous, gory and appalling world of bits, slime and bytes.
First thing first! Let’s get rid of the bullshit bingo lingo: “Relevancy tuning” in search is a fancy description for something that’s not very magical, even if it sounds like just that. It’s about getting the right results on top of your search result. End of story. If somebody asks you a question, you should [...]
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 [...]
