Research

04 Competitive Analysis

"With rebellion in the ranks, the smell of decent cuisine aroused revolution. "No longer!" they shouted.
LUNCH AT NOON was conceived."

Our competitive analysis went primarily in two phases. The first phase dealt with understanding recipe search sites in general, whereas our second phase focused on sites that had a similar mission to Holistic Impressions. Thus the above quote from Lunch-At-Noon.com; they are an example of a site that seems to value the impress factor of a meal as much or more as they value the meal itself — the perfect example on which to base Holistic Impressions.

Phase 1

The following sites were critiqued in the first phase of our analysis:

• allrecipes.com
• bettycrocker.com
• cooking.com
• copykat.com
• epicurious.com
• foodnetwork.com
• netcooks.com
• recipezaar.com
• vegweb.com

While this initial push primed us to think about recipes, it was a bit of a disservice in that it focused us on the needs for robust database capabilities in a recipe search site. Recipezaar.com, for example, boasts tens of thousands of recipes. It took one iteration of our site to realize our angle: We aren't competing with the number of recipes. We're competing with style.

Phase 2

A few sites were reviewed in this phase, but the primary point of inspiration was lunch-at-noon.com. It provided a look-and-feel that we thought we wanted to achieve in a site like Holistic Impressions. However, there are a number of areas where we felt lunch-at-noon fell short. Below, we highlight some of the good points and bad points we saw in lunch-at-noon:

• Lunch-at-noon relies on large, high-quality images of food to sell their users on a particular recipe. Based on our other research, we knew this was a must-have feature.
• Lunch-at-noon focused on providing individual recipes. The push of Holistic Impressions was to provide a more comprehensive recipe search, in that users browse through meals, not individual recipes.
• While the place setting metaphor was interesting, our group felt that it failed as an effective navigation structure. We used the place setting to convey a meal, which we feel was a more effective of that image.
• Lunch-at-noon paid no attention to dietary restrictions, which we felt, above all other search parameters, was a critical aspect of sorting in a recipe search. This claim is supported by one user in Directed Storytelling.