In-progress

Unit picker

Search and select from precise and rough units

What is this for?

When adding ingredients, we should be able to pick units such as teaspoon or cups.

Initially a simple component, but this sparked a greater discussion.


Professional recipes include measurements for everything. The goal, after all, is to help the end user replicate that dish.

However, when normies like us write recipes, we don’t have the time to measure ingredients and note them down. We don’t know how many grams of sugar or how many pounds of chicken we used, we just know it’s a little bit of this, and a bit more of that.


We could design this feature to only support proper & precise units (the world as it should be) or we could support rough units and ratios (the world as it is). So we did the latter!

Rough units are a first class citizen. You can use a handful of basil, a bunch of. Or, you can use no numbers and units at all! It’s more natural and more fun to ideate this way.

Of course, for others who are more precise, we added every possible unit of measurement for cooking. Did you know there’s something called a “matsked” and it’s only used in Sweden?

Designs

Initially, we really wanted to emphasize rough vs precise units. This led to a more complicated design.

As time passed, we thought we could simplify it a lot. This will probably be the final design for now.

 
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