Designing and evaluating a digital tool to support online search of Swedish food recipes : facilitating the search process for the users

Abstract: Searching for food recipes online is a common task for many people in an increasingly digitalised society. Sweden has, as many countries, local recipes, seasonal products, cultural dinners and measurement and weight standards that can differ from other coun- tries. However general searches for Swedish recipes at common search engines can pose several difficulties. For example that users can’t filter the search results by recipes and that there can be difficulties with ambiguous semantic evaluations of the users’ search queries. Aspects considered in this thesis are also how the user search process could be facilitated by using recipe labels and graphical visualisations of the information. The ambition of this thesis is investigate how online recipe search can be made more effi- cient for people looking for Swedish recipes in Swedish. An initial user survey with a questionnaire was conducted to understand the po- tential requirements for the development of a tool to support online search of Swedish recipes. More specifically, the survey inquired about users’ current search experience and tried to identify useful search criteria. The results showed that 82.4% of the par- ticipants prefer to search for recipes online via a search engine, compared with other alternatives such as searching at specific recipe sites. The main difficulty the partici- pants experienced with that search approach was that many of the search results were not recipes but other types of search results. Most participants preferred to see more in- formative recipe items in the search results list. However at the same time, some recipe labels that were present were not actually noticed by most participants. The survey also investigated further what information that could be more appropriate to show about the recipes. Based on the outcomes from the survey study, a prototype application was then developed that targets for Swedish recipe search. The purpose of the prototype is to im- plement the search criteria identified from the survey and to provide enhancements. By developing this prototype, the search criteria could be tested by users on the prototype. A second user survey with a questionnaire was then conducted, evaluating the usabil- ity of the prototype. The prototype shows to offer improvements in filtering the search results to only show Swedish recipes, presenting more relevant recipe information and also improvements in visualising the information in the recipes in the search result list.