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Figure 2: When users search for “meatloaf” they get a “Did you mean?” result with a misspelling
Participants also expressed a desire to have more advanced search options, as well as the ability
to view their most recent searches and recipes.
There were a number of issues that our participants found when using the filter options. First, and
most importantly, the filters do not currently allow users to select vegetarian or vegan options. One
of our participants, who is a vegetarian, was highly frustrated with this and felt that the website was
not a good fit for her because of this oversight. We also found that the filters do not always work as
expected. For instance, filtering for dairy free options returns results that do, in fact, contain dairy.
Specifically, many of these results contained butter.
We also found that, in addition to wanting a filter for vegetarian recipes, participants expressed
interest in wanting to filter by specific ingredients or nutritional value. There was also some
confusion over what the “seasonal” filter referred to, and they wondered if this feature was
somehow based on their geographic location.
Recommendations
The search and filter options are of central importance to users, and we recommend that
GastroMighty invest in making them as usable as possible. Correcting the internal dictionary of the
site, and making sure that search returns appropriate results is of utmost importance for a good
experience with the website.
Additionally, users would greatly benefit from additional filters, and we feel that a vegetarian filter is
critical towards addressing a significant demographic’s needs. Of secondary importance is giving
users the ability to filter by vegan recipes, by recipes that are under a certain calorie limit, and by
recipes that have specific ingredients.
We also suggest creating an advanced search option so that users can search, for example, for
recipes that contain chicken but not mushrooms. We feel that Google’s advanced search option
would be a good model for GastroMighty to work from. Finally, including a “Recently Viewed” area
would help users remember what recipes they have already looked at, and would aid them in easily
finding recipes that they want to see again.
Usability Testing Report 10