Allrecipes.com. Sharon Y. Kim IST 616 Final Presentation

Transcription

1 + Allrecipes.com Sharon Y. Kim IST 616 Final Presentation

2 + Introducing: Allrecipes.com Allrecipes.com is a global social networking site that is focused on food. Users can search for recipes, post recipes, comment on recipes, post pictures for recipes, and even rank them. Founded in 1997, acquired by Meredith Corporation in As of 2011, the site has amassed over 55 million pieces of food-focused content. Allrecipes itself has become a powerful global brand, with impact carrying over into multiple platforms: 17 websites, 16 mobile sites, 9 mobile apps, 13 ebooks.

3 + Allrecipes.com Homepage

4 + Who uses it? Statistics: as of 2011, 25 million unique visitors. Global: run in 22 different countries and 11 different languages (see next slide for Korean homepage example). Demographics: majority of audience is female, age range years old. Allrecipes.com was just acquired by Meredith Corporation, a media and marketing company largely targeted toward American women. But ANYONE can use it Allrecipes.com is free, although you can join as a member or as a supporting member for more benefits.

5 + Global Allrecipes.com (Korea)

6 + User Interface One of the most important things for a social sharing site is user interface. Allrecipes.com does pretty well: good mix of pictures, video, and text. The site also has multiple index tabs in various places. By themselves, the index tabs are easy to understand ( Recipes gets you the recipes, Bread gives you the bread recipes, etc.). BUT a first-time user may not know where to begin. Too many choices, too many places to click!

7 + Paradox of Choice?

8 + Indexing and Classification On the most basic level, Allrecipes is a giant database of recipes. But the site also contains other information, and there are indices for everything: recipes, menus, pictures, comments, blog posts, videos, etc. Faceted classification (see next slide for screenshot of site map) This makes it very nice to search for a specific type of recipe that you re looking for, but there are no classification markers or tags that appear when the user is looking at an actual recipe. Ex: a recipe for chicken salad does not have a visible marker or tag for chicken, so even though I can navigate to that recipe using the term chicken, I cannot start from the recipe and expand to all recipes with the term chicken.

9 + So Many Ways to Find One Recipe And actually: one recipe could possibly be in six or seven of these categories at once

10 + Searching Boolean search Truncated search Advanced search How advanced does it get, you ask?

11 + Advanced Search

12 + User Support Very detailed Customer Support page FAQ section Categories for problems or more information (ex: Membership Information, Cooking Questions, Mobile ) clear and visible on Customer Support homepage, but phone number is not Must go to Contact page for that information. Everything is in text (no video tutorials, etc.), which makes it somewhat hard to muddle through.

13 + User Support Page

14 + Maintenance Although Allrecipes.com tries to go through and clean up the data (fix any errors, etc.) and has staff for technical maintenance issues Allrecipes.com is all about the USER. As a social sharing and networking site, the users upload and, to a certain extent, maintain the content. How much content there is, which content gets the most exposure (via rating systems, comment counts, etc.) This is all up to the user.

15 + Overall Faceted classification system, multiple indices, advanced search capabilities. User interface with different types of media (text, picture, video, etc.) and across different platforms. Social: it s all up to the user. Any drawbacks? TOO much going on for a first-time user, potentially confusing. User support limited to text-only. Do they integrate the recipes from their global sites into one place? Can I get those Korean recipes from the US Allrecipes.com site?

16 + Eat. Enjoy. The End.