Feedback for Picture Cook: Cook with pictures

This is interesting. I've been cooking from recipes for years now, here are my thoughts:

When I was starting out cooking I occasionally didn't know how to prepare food in some steps. This is where pictures can help, however occasionally I wanted to see the actual photo of how exactly was the food prepared in a step (rather than cartoon drawing). There are a lot of cooking blogs which add pictures of how food looks at certain stages. Still, this can be fun way of getting into cooking for people who don't cook much and kids.

The biggest problem for recreating a recipe is not knowing the amounts. Very often in recipes you'd see '1 onion' or '2 small aubergines'. The problem is that my 'small' is not necessarily your 'small'. And even without size specified the weight of fruit or vegetables can vary significantly. What I think every recipe needs is always specifying exact weight or volume. And don't even get me started about us cups as a unit of measurement. Some will say that one doesn't need to be this accurate but I think when the weight of my vegetables is twice as originally intended and I'm trying to multiply the recipe by 2 or 3 times then that can make a big difference in a lot of cases.

Which brings me to another point - multiplying the recipe. I've seen it on some websites that you can enter the amount of desired portions and the recipe's ingredient amounts will be automatically calculated. This is great as I usually cook in bigger batches and even now I occasionally make a mistake of not multiplying a single ingredient, especially in recipes with lots of them.

Finally, there were occasional recipes that I followed to the letter and the result was still not great. Mistakes (missing ingredients, bad proportions/weights/volumes) and not trying out the recipe before posting it can be very unpleasant especially if you want to prepare a big batch of expensive food.

Looks promising very nice.

I really like this idea. The main problem I have with recipes is this... When I google a recipe like "pasta carbonara" I get 10 websites on Google and all of these websites scatter the important recipe information I am looking for amid 1000 ads offering me the chance to buy the ingredients online at Kroger's (which I never do).

What I like about your website is it gives me all the info I want in a nice, simple, visually appealing manner QUICKLY. I'd use this.

The one thing I'd change about your landing page is perhaps put a sample recipe above the fold? It took me 3 seconds to figure out I could click the Recipes tab to see what exactly you are offering (and what you are offering is awesome). I worry some users won't click on the Recipes tab so they won't see the great content you are offering.

Mario. Thanks for sharing your idea.

The idea seems very cool. I think you could save time and provide more value by taking photos and, if necessary, illustrate words and graphics on top of the images. For example, if the recipe calls for two cups of flour, you could show two separate cups of flour with the flour package behind it. If the recipe calls for you to combine several ingredients into a bowl, you could have four images of the ingredients measure out as mentioned above and consolidate the four images into one image with four sections.

Regarding the web page:

1. On the landing page, create white/negative space between different sections to help users differentiate content and not overwhelm the user. Everything seems smushed together.
2. On the "See Recipes" page, insert an image of the final product. A picture tells a story, and stories are how people make sense of the world.

Please tell me what questions you have.