A recipe for success: The design, use, and effectiveness of multimodal online baking instructions
Ielka van der Sluis, Hanna Mellema · Multimodality & Society · 2024
This paper presents three studies on the design, use and effectiveness of multimodal online baking blogs that present cookie recipes in two forms: illustrated step-by-step Instructions with Pictures and printable text-only Recipe Cards. Firstly, a corpus study describes how authors combine text and pictures in 15 blogs. Secondly, an eye-tracking study was conducted to explore how 12 participants read and evaluate baking blogs and the Instructions with Pictures in them. Finally, a user study was conducted to explore how 4 teams of participants execute and evaluate either an Instruction with Pictures or a Recipe Card of a typical baking blog. Questionnaire data on the readers’ and users’ judgments of the comprehensibility, design and their (expected) performance of the instructions, as well as eye-tracker data and videos capturing the reading and baking practices were collected and analysed. Thus, the triangulation of exploratory studies displays how different research methodologies inform the relevance and evaluation of particular characteristics of multimodal presentations given the readers’ and users’ judgments as well as through objective measurements that provide complementary insights on multimodal baking instructions in terms of multimodal information presentation, reading strategies and situated use.