Category: Kitchen metaphor

Recently, Jakob Nielsen published one of his Alertbox posts with the title Anybody Can Do Usability. In this post, he made a comparison between cooking and usability.

According to Jakob, usability is like cooking dinner:

• Everybody needs the outcome;
• Anybody can perform the most basic activities;
• Anyone can learn these basics pretty quickly;
• There’s a level of excellence beyond the basics;
• Skill levels form a continuum from beginner to expert.

The cooking analogy stretches even further:

• Although multi-star gourmet restaurants are wonderful, there’s also a place in the world for modest neighborhood restaurants.
• Even if you can afford it, you shouldn’t eat out every day.
• Variety is the spice of life.
• Sometimes it’s nice to have others do the work.
• There’s value to being an outsider who’s not restrained by corporate politics or “the way things are usually done.”

So like cooking, anybody can do usability; the basic methods are simple enough.

Ron Gagnier (IBM CAN) sees an analogy between the process of cooking with recipes and the process of user-centered software design. Almost just like we do.

From his article at UXmatters: “I may have taken my analogy of following a recipe too far, but I really do think the comparison is a valid one. Recipes exist to ensure cooks can acquire the right ingredients, follow a sequence of predefined steps, and prepare a dish consistently every time. The same is true of a software design process: By following a design process, an entire project team can know what steps to perform and what they’ll deliver. When your team must make substitutions, let experience and sound judgment guide you in making the most appropriate choices. Continue to learn and grow in your role as a designer, because this will help you make better substitution decisions.”

During the Chi 2009 panel discussion (moderated by Patañjali S. Venkatacharya) on what user experience designers could learn from food designers, the following references were mentioned.

• Blackwell, A. F. 2006. The reification of metaphor as a design tool, ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 13, 4 (Dec. 2006), 490-530.
• Grimes, A. and Harper, R. 2008. Celebratory technology: new directions for food research in HCI. In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 – 10, 2008). CHI ’08. ACM, New York, NY, 467-476.
• Kowalski, L., Ashley, J., and Vaughan, M. W. 2006. When design is not the problem: better usability through non-design means. In CHI ’06 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montréal, Québec, Canada, April 22 – 27, 2006). CHI ’06. ACM, New York, NY, 165-170.
• Langford, D. and Jones, C. 1994. The kitchen interface—a lateral approach to GUI. SIGCHI Bull. 26, 2 (Apr. 1994), 41-45.
• Oppenheimer, A. and Reavey, H. 2003. Beyond “puree”: reinventing the blender. In Proceedings of the 2003 Conference on Designing For User Experiences (San Francisco, California, June 06 – 07, 2003). DUX ’03. ACM, New York, NY, 1-10. Better ways to find the right recipe
• Svensson, M., Höök, K., and Cöster, R. 2005. Designing and evaluating kalas: A social navigation system for food recipes. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 12, 3 (Sep. 2005), 374-400.

Caroline Jarrett writes in Caroline’s Corner about the differences between The Heuristic Inspection (Gordon Ramsay) and User-Centered Design (Heston Blumenthal) on how to improve the restaurant experiences. On Ramsay “I realised that Ramsay is really doing heuristic inspections. He has a list of specific things that a good restaurant should do, starting with basic hygiene (he’s very keen on not killing the diners). He looks at the quality of service, level of organisation in the kitchen, portion control and profitability.” and on Blumenthal “Blumenthal watched the videos of the user reactions and totally changed his approach (now, doesn’t that sound familiar?). He started to think about the users, and not just the diners who already chose Little Chef.”

It seems that many UX designers, consultants and specialists see Gordon Ramsay as an appropriate role model of what they do. At least for Patrick Kennedy and Todd Hoff.

Based upon the restaurant metaphor with a front stage (dining room) and a back stage (kitchen), the authors advice information architects and other user experience professionals to apply their thinking to the area of content management in the back stage as well.

“(…) the brand quality layer ‘Brand Experience‘ illustrates our perception of user experience and brand management of the main stations. We studied the usability, user value, and interface (simplicity, character, and feedback), and rated each site on a scale of eating at various types of Japanese restaurants. (…) We chose restaurants as the metaphor for brand experience because, from an interactive branding point of view, a visit to a website is like a visit to a restaurant in terms of service, feedback, content, pleasure, character, and memorability. And also because Tokyo has the highest density of good restaurants in the world.” – courtesy of ruurdpriester

“The idea of thoughtful reduction is an important one in the creation process, whether the end result is a new recipe or user interface: how do you make things simpler without removing what’s necessary?” says Lisa Agustin in Information Design Watch

Gordon Ramsey: A guerilla UX consultant?

Adaptive Path’s Experience Design Director Ryan Freitas published his presentation ‘A House Divided: Two Perspectives on Managing the Customer Experience’.

“Restaurants experiment with the elements of the dining experience that are hidden from their customers. If it makes sense to move elements of production forward, consider it as a means to build a compelling experience.”

Also, he refers to an interesting paper by Robert Glushko and Lindsay Tabas. Great stuff!