The Challenge

Dates & Chai is a recipe and cooking website that offers users the ability to save, customize, and share their recipe book of saved recipes. Dates & Chai has outgrown their initial design and would like to offer more to their growing user base.

Approach

A clean design aesthetic that focuses on site architecture and organization, as well as offers advanced search and filtering capabilities drastically improves the Dates & Chai User Experience.

Forgiving Format is a design pattern utilized in Dates & Chai's search function. The user can filter their search for a recipe by name, ingredient, dish type, holiday, or pretty much any other keyword that is listed in a recipe. The forgiving format provides a better user experience by allowing the user to perform searches using a variety of means, instead of being so restrictive and likely leading to errors or empty search results.

Two methods that can be used to make auto-completion more accurate are storing previous entries using local storage and storing common phrases widely used by users as a built-in dictionary. Both methods are similar and essentially provide a dataset of entries that are most likely to be entered by the user. By anticipating what the user is likely to enter, we can show suggestions or hints to aid the user in completing the entry.