Rethinking search at one of the best known recipe sites on the internet.

Food Network's search was dominated by recipes.   Its not surprising, but there were other useful pieces of content - articles, how to's, photo galleries, videos - that were being missed due to the emphasis on recipes.  The team wanted to redesign search to expose more variety of matching content and allow people to search/filter on recipe content only.

Role: Product Design, Search strategy

Solution

Food Network's search feature searched their recipe collection, and only their recipe collection.  Results contained none of the rich collection of articles, how to's, videos and photo galleries that enhanced the site, not to mention show, chef and tv schedule information.

I designed a tabbed search feature that defaulted people to an 'All' tab --a mix of results, with presentation styles suited to the content type.

To keep the existing recipe search/filter capabilities, I gave users the ability to switch to a recipes-only result tab.  

On the recipe results, an eyetracking study showed little interaction with left column filters, so I relocated them to the top to make them easily available.  I concentrated on the most used filters, giving users the choices to narrow results by show, chef, course, ingredient, and source.

Some time post launch we tested the success of the switch by A/B testing search results defaulting to the All tab vs. the Recipes tab.   Recipe tab default resulted in lower page views and a higher exit rate, confirming the All strategy as a successful one.