What Are You Craving?

I’ve been doing a lot of research today in Information Architecture and User Experience, and I came across Cookthink.com in Stephen Anderson’s lovely presentation, Inspiration from the Edge: New Patterns for Interface Design.

Cookthink really gets right down to the meat (no pun intended) of why you’re at the site in the first place – you’re looking to cook something, but need some ideas based on what you’ve already got in your head. If I were to ask what do you feel like cooking, I feel like making something with avocado or I want to eat something Indian tonight are both very appropriate responses, and Cookthink has designed a brilliant and simple way of letting you express that.

Now, if I’m not sure what type of cuisine you want, but you just want to see what kind of recipes are available, clicking the cuisine link above brings you here:

If you’re Web-saavy, you’ll immediately recognize these as tags, and they’ve done something which I find is exceedingly rare – they’ve implemented a tag cloud in a very natural way. This design is also very emotional – it gets right down to your wants and desires (cravings).

After you’ve clicked one or more tags, or typed in your own that matches what you crave, you can bring up a recipe that you’re interested in:

The (delicious-sounding) recipe for Prosciutto-Wrapped Asparagus With Lemon-Shallot Vinaigrette comes up with cleanly laid out instructions and ingredients and beautiful photos. You’re also given suggestions along the left about complimentary dishes you can pair this with, and instructions on “the basics” answering questions like “What is prosciutto?” and “How to prep asparagus”.

It’s no secret that I’m not the world’s greatest cook, but I’m practicing like mad lately, and recently received this great cookbook called Anyone Can Cook that’s formatted in a very similar way. It’s hard to replicate the ease and simplicity of links to related content within a book, though, so I’ll for sure be bookmarking this site for the future.

Cookthink