As you may know, our development team reads every single suggestion that comes in via our feedback form.
One of the more common feature requests is to combine like-items on the grocery list, and sometimes, people wonder why this isn’t already done, since it seems so easy – simply take 1 egg, 2 eggs, and add them together, and boom – that’s 3 eggs.
We are definitely looking at this type of feature, but I first wanted to take a moment to explain why it’s not as trivial a feature as it first may appear.
Major design goals we have for BigOven that impact our ability to deliver this include:
- allow cooks to ADD entire recipes to the grocery list,
- allow cooks to DELETE recipes, right up until the last minute, even at the grocery store, and have their list accurately reflect their change-of-mind
- allow cooks to add recipes to the site in as unconstrained-a-way as we can – i.e., keep the text the way the cook wants to express it (we support snapping photos of handwritten recipes, entering them by URL and typing them in by hand)
- allow cooks to use any of the 200,000+ recipes already entered in the site
If you cook like me, your grocery list can change right at the last minute, when you suddenly notice that avocados are in season and on-sale at the grocery store. We want to be sure that if you change your mind, you can simply swipe the entire recipe off the grocery list, and all the underlying items for that recipe are automatically deleted for you, and no more. Summing the items together would certainly present a challenge in later subtracting that out – or, conversely, we’d have to engineer two “views” of the grocery list, the underlying one and the consolidated one. Providing two views of the grocery list can add complexity, not just to the development but also the usage of the app and site.
Another related goal is to allow people to post recipes in as unconstrained a manner as possible. That is, we don’t want to “shoehorn” the user into a rigid data entry process, because one person’s “scallions” are another person’s “green onions”, and some would like to express their prepnotes as “finely chopped” and others would like to say “finely diced”. We consider your recipe your own, and don’t want to mess with the way that the text is written.
Thus, recipes can end up with:
- 2 whole green onions, finely diced
and another recipe can have:
- 3 scallions, chopped
A final matter is that not every cook fully respects the “Item Name” and “Prepnotes” boxes – some might enter “finely chopped scallions” as the item name, and others might enter “scallions” in the item name and “finely chopped” in the prepnotes (the preferred style).
Now, BigOven knows that both “green onions” and “scallions” can be found in “Produce”. But to collapse it into 5 green onions for you, and also allow you to remove one of the recipes at the last minute, and present that to you accurately at every stage across the platforms, is not as trivial as it first appears.
Showing a consolidated list would make it very difficult to then subtract-out the recipe and all the ingredients at the last minute, and would also make it difficult to combine the prepnotes in a logical way. We are looking into it, but that’s why this seemingly trivial feature (combining like items) isn’t quite as easy as it first appears, given our goal to allow the removal of recipes right up at the grocery store.
Instead, what BigOven does is group items by aisle for you, and sort them alphabetically within that aisle. Then, you can quickly scan the list to see what you need.
This isn’t to say that we think the design as-is is finished and perfect – we’re always looking to make it better. It’s simply an update on why this “please combine items automatically” isn’t quite as trivial as it first may seem, and it does come with tradeoffs.
Recent Comments