Building on the findings from testing iteration 1, I ran a card sort to better understand what people typically had in their pantry as there was some confusion during the iteration 1 tests phase of what should happen on the ingredient input screen.
I realised that the staples I was presenting were a bit confusing. Not everyone had these and others seemed to be missing as users tried to add in more ingredients. Getting a better understanding for what people were working with usually from the get go would be helpful and I chose to do this with a card sort. In part because I had never done a card sort before and honestly they look like fun.
Peopled tended to have what I thought they would in their pantry as the popular placement matrix suggests, but there was a lot that I had missed out on as the affinity mapping also suggests.
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Below is the Miro board where you can see the findings more clearly.
https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVNxajSsI=/?moveToWidget=3458764585709196562&cot=14
Understanding what people tended to have in their pantries made me question if I even needed my user to tell me what they had at home – I could directly suggest recipes that included common pantry ingredients and save my user the step of having to input this information. This was also an opportunity for the guest vs account experience: an account holder could specify what they have at home so that recipes suggested would match that information, but a guest user would still get helpful suggestions based on research into what my users tended to have at home.
This design of sidestepping of asking users what they had at home could also solve the snag around adding in more than one ingredient that I had come across in the iteration 1 tests. My iteration 1 testers that had tried to add in more ingredients had all tried to add in food you find in a pantry – or at least what felt like pantry food to me and they all ended up being what cropped up in the card sort exercise.
With this new guest experience design focusing on just inputting your one problem ingredient, it would dissuade the user from trying to add in more. As an account holder, the ability to say what else you have at home could also remove the desire to have to include it in the search bar. This was new functionality from last time so I wanted to pay close attention to whether users still tried to add in more ingredients, I also tightened the language around it being about just searching for solutions with one problem food.