FoodMagic.com

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In January 2000, I was recruited by a consulting firm in Los Angeles, to meet with one of their clients. ParaSoft, had been incubating an incredible "one-to-one preference matching technology," for the food and music verticals. They needed someone to assess the usability of the existing demonstration project, which I did. I was so smitten with the project that I took on the full time position they offered me, to handle every aspect of the front end of FoodMagic, their food preference matching technology.

I was responsible for

• information architecture
• graphic & user interface design
• project management & scheduling
  
• usability design and testing
• proposal development
• logo development/marketing/branding
• presentation development
• documentation/technical & copy writing

The online demonstration project was never intended to be a actual destination site, and because of this, I wasn't given the time or freedom to develop it the way I might have, had it been intended for real use or if I had been involved from the start. The technology rocked, way before I arrived, but the interface/ architecture needed a major overhaul. The problem for me was that I couldn't undo some of the most maddening previous misadventures of information architecture without unravelling programmatically critical things elsewhere, and so when I last worked on it, there were still a great number of things that made me cringe. But despite those obstacles, we got it to the point of being a zillion times more user friendly, and it was a great project for me, with an incredibly diverse range of responsibilities and a totally phenomenal team. It was sad to see the rapidly imploding Internet of 2000-2001 and a constantly shifting business model, take out a project with so much potential.

There is no way to really showcase a site like this except to visit and actually use foodmagic.com, but it no longer even vaguely resembles what I left behind. The project stalled financially for a couple months, during which time I left, and then a new designer came in and changed it so much I can't even figure out how to use it (sad to say because I was perhaps its 3rd biggest fan). Plus, its hard to show what I did do, without showing what it was BEFORE I got there! I wish I took screen shots of the old site or got a copy of it before I even started. However, I can provide specific samples of work within obvious restrictions, to prospective clients and employers who require them, on request. Or you can look at some of the design screen shots below.

And you can always read what my boss and my technical counterpart have said about me :)

Click to enlarge any of these screen shots

FoodMagic Meal Plan This was the main screen that people saw, where FoodMagic would create a meal plan based on the users individual tastes, within a template of dietary needs and eating habits.
Recipe View This is a recipe view, where they can swap in new recipes that are similar, adjust the serving sizes, and so on.
Search Because FoodMagic has SO many features, the search was a huge challenge. These are some screen shots from the application as I last left it.
Help I researched and wrote the content for an extensive searchable context-sensitive help system (the guys programmed it, I didn't)
Tour These are shots from the tour I created which was linked from the home page, introducing people to how the FoodMagic application worked.

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