Coming Soon: ChefSteps Mobile App

Sounds great!

Android, please.

John_Erik_522

mso-ansi-language:EN-GB">Here is my experience with ChefSteps on mobile (iPhone

5, iOS 7).

mso-ansi-language:EN-GB">When I visit ChefSteps on my phone I am usually looking

for something specific. I use it two places mainly. In the store, and in the

kitchen. In the store I need the list of ingredients for a specific recipe. In

this situation I’m not interested in reading a lot of text or learn some new

technique. I just need the recipe and the list. Actually, until recently I

navigated to the recipes via the menu button. For a site based on recipes I

thought you did a good job of hiding the recipes with this flow: menu button

> Recipes > ChefSteps Recipes > Search > choose the recipe.

mso-ansi-language:EN-GB">

mso-ansi-language:EN-GB">Well why didn’t I just choose “Latest from ChefSteps”?

I didn’t think it was relevant. I thought it was latest activities, news and so

on. In that situation, in the store, I am on my way home from work, in a hurry,

hungry and not in the mood to browse around. So I never clicked it. Stupid me.

I just want the recipe and for a long time the UI guided me via the menu

button. If the text had said “Latest recipes” on the other hand… Oh and the

slider never works as you probably know.

mso-ansi-language:EN-GB">

mso-ansi-language:EN-GB">Same thing in the kitchen. Very specific needs. There

is a recipe I want to try out, and I need the step by step instructions, and

the video. I think this works pretty well in this situation. Maybe the font

size could be a bit bigger as I have my phone lying on the kitchen counter and

I’m not necessarily standing directly over the phone when following the

instructions.

mso-ansi-language:EN-GB">

mso-ansi-language:EN-GB">Other than that I think the responsive site works

pretty well, but I am looking foreward to seeing how the app turns out.

mso-ansi-language:EN-GB">

mso-ansi-language:EN-GB">Keep up the good work.

mso-ansi-language:EN-GB">

mso-ansi-language:EN-GB">-JE-

Android please, I have no apple mobile products whatsoever.

As far as the app itself goes, I would love to see a "tools" section where we could have a timer, a C to F converter, and hopefully with this wiki kicking off we could have a units converter as well.

I like the streamlined look of that screenshot and feel like if it could mimic the new youtube mobile interface it would be great for browsing the recipes and videos.

As I indicated, I'm an Android user as well. But I understand the unique platform challenges that OS presents. I'm guessing you guys might also have user statistics that show most ChefSteps members are accessing via iOS.

T__2156

iOS Here. Like @John Eric, on mobile I'm usually downstairs in the kitchen trying to remember the recipe - or having hastily jotted down the recipe, I'm looking for a picture to compare with.

I'm very happy the "adjust your grams on the fly" function works on mobile.

I've also, a couple of times, had to wait until I get home to answer something on the forum - which means that I post _slightly_ less often, but my posts are _slightly_ more well-thought-out and _significantly_ more likely to contain a photo. So heads up - mobile posting adjusts several sliders and will change the tenor of the conversation on the forum a bit.

Neat idea, but we're Android users in this neck-of-the-woods.

Andrew_Hsu_30145

Thanks for all the responses so far. Keep them coming. As Matthew correctly pointed out, iOS dominates our mobile use cases, which is why we're focusing on that first. But we will definitely take your requests under consideration.

I'd love to get thoughts from all of you on how we can best use the mobile platform to encourage learning, question asking and answering, and matching those who need help with those who have the knowledge. What tools to improve learning would make you a better cook?

michaelnatkin

Our mobile usage seems to be 75% iOS, 24% Android... and 0.66% Windows phone

Are there any plans for the website to eventually go "responsive?"

I rarely use forums on my mobile devices because I never find it user friendly. Plus typing on a phone or tablet is annoying. What I would like from an app though would be an easier way to take and share photos to the community. Maybe like a photostream type situation where registered site users can snap and share food photos with captions much like instagram, I think that would increase engagement.

I also feel like maybe a live chat feature where we can throw out queries to other users or you guys at chefsteps so we can get simple questions answered in real time. The forum is great for that but sometimes threads get buried or we all wait patiently for grant or chris to chime in.

Is that like Skynet becoming 'self-aware'?

Chris_Young_80640

Those of you who have been around ChefSteps for a while have commented that try to be very responsive to our community. I certainly hope that is a general perception most of you have. I think it might be worth explaining how we tend to decide on what to work on with our limited (but really talented) development team.

In general, our approach is to ask what is painful for our community right now? That turns out to be a really long list, so the next question we ask is "can we solve X" with our current technical resources? If the answer is: sure, but we would need +10 A-list developers, then we don't tackle the problem (sadly, the forum and commenting system fall into this category right now). If it's a problem that we think we know how to solve, with our existing team (or maybe one great hire), and we think it makes it easier for all of you to participate in a collaboration with us, among yourselves, or to share your knowledge and expertise, or simply to become a smarter cook, then we will take a very serious look at solving X.

Andrew and Nick approached us about doing some work on the mobile-version of ChefSteps. Right now our site is pretty responsive on mobile devices. But it's not perfect. And things like the forum are beyond our direct control. So we've been discussing what would be a valuable mobile experience for our community. The current thinking is making it a bit better for viewing some of our content, but more important, making it easier for you to contribute to the narrative around the development of these recipes.

A really big problem we think exists is "discovery cost". Basically, we have a lot of great members who have a lot to contribute. Maybe they know the answer to a question we have, or the answer to a question or a problem another member is having. How can we make it much easier for the right people to become aware of a question or a challenge, and then incentivise some of them to get involved in answering those questions or challenges?

Basically, we need a better system for matchmaking among our community members. It's a big challenge, but we're going to try to solve it. And mobile seems like a good first place to tackle this because it affords an easy way to push relevant notifications and lower the barrier to contributing a quick answer or a helpful photo.

But this is how we're thinking about it right now. What do you think? Keep your input coming folks, we take it all very seriously.

I think my idea of a live chat type setting would answer that engagement question. Say I have a question about lamb cooking times, I know @johan is the lamb whisperer so I could ping him in the chatroom and hope that he can shoot me a quick reply, or i could throw it out there in realtime where someone with that knowledge could give me a simple 3-4 word response and i'd be on my way.

Or another use case, I'm at the grocery store, standing in front of a variety of fish and meat trying to decide what to eat, I throw out a question with a picture of what's in front of me and others could in real time chime in on what they think I should go with and we could be in essence collaborating on each other's meals and decisions.

@Chris and all.....
GASP!!!! I hope my question above wasn't misunderstood....I meant "responsive" in a technical and design way...nothing else...in other words the entire website would automatically resize and reformat in response to any size device or screen like many newer Wordpress themes and the like do. I should have been more clear, I certainly didn't mean for it to sound like some sort of criticism. : (

Responsive Web Design

Hmmm....I just noticed that the website itself (but not the forum) does respond "responsively."

It didn't resize for a smaller device when I tried it some time ago....my device anyway.

Cool!!!

Brandon_34695

The main website is pretty good for mobile layouts! I will probably prefer the iOS app in the future for referencing recipes in the kitchen.

The forum works pretty well as is on an iPad. On the iPhone, it has a limited vertical layout that I find for me personally not very good. I usually jump into topics from the "Recent Discussions" link, which doesn't exist on the mobile version. Recently, someone fixed the "Full Site" link that was previously not working. Using the full version on a phone is not terrible.

@brandon_ i save a bookmark on my phone with the URL set to forum.chefsteps.com/discussions and it will jump me right to the recent discussions every time.

Brandon_34695

That's perfect, thanks Brendan.

I'm not really sure I'd want/expect the forum to be part of a mobile app experience, not trying to muddle things really.

Allen_Johnson_67197

I would agree with the Android app is also needed. Lots of great ideas already being tossed around and am glad to be apart of this awesome community.

pgcath

Given the location, it would be awesome to have a Microsoft Phone app. It's a slam dunk.

wschreuders_29485

So what I'd really like as a feature would be ability to, while logged into the site on my desktop and view a recipe, send that recipe's ingredients as a shopping list to the mobile app. So you're looking at the recipe for eggnog, click the "add to buying list" and those ingredients get added to my list of things to buy (still showing the connection to the eggnog so I know why I'm buying it when I'm at the shops)

Those ingredients are then pushed to the phone so when I'm in the shops (where they often haven't got good reception or wi-fi) the list is available to me. With the ability to mark items as purchased or not.

You could also take it further and add alternatives to certain ingredients if I can't find the particular ones for that recipe. And you could even use location-based services telling me where I could buy certain ingredients, that could be a community powered feature which allows members to log geographical locations of retailers selling ingredients.

tshewman

From app (I too would lke an android app :-)..) view a recipe, list of ingredients (and amounts), have "add to shopping list" function. Give the recipe as text and optional step by step pictures and video (as you have on the website) with links to relevant techniques for that recipe (that would include text and video instructions). Essentially an interactive app that is functional, but not necessarily social. That said, a function to perhaps take a picture and comment to add to the social portion that would be viewable on the website may also be a welcome feature. ,

view

a recipe, send that recipe's ingredients as a shopping list to the

mobile app. So you're looking at the recipe for eggnog, click the "add

to buying list" and those ingredients get added to my list of things to

buy (still showing the connection to the eggnog so I know why I'm buying

it when I'm at the shops)

Those ingredients are then pushed to

the phone so when I'm in the shops (where they often haven't got good

reception or wi-fi) the list is available to me. With the ability to

mark items as purchased or not.

You could also take it further

and add alternatives to certain ingredients if I can't find the

particular ones for that recipe. And you could even use location-based

services telling me where I could buy certain ingredients, that could be

a community powered feature which allows members to log geographical

locations of retailers selling ingredients. - See more at:

http://forum.chefsteps.com/discussion/1442/coming-soon-chefsteps-mobile-app#latest