Recipe sub-goals and graphs: an evaluation by cooks

Following recipes can be difficult for cooks. Many recipes use technical culinary language and condense their instructions into brief sentences, cooks may also get lost in long paragraphs as they jump around the recipe to find tasks to perform in parallel. Multimedia content has been shown to increase the confidence of cooks but few comparative evaluations have been reported. In this study we evaluated the effect of adding pictures of interim goal states to a plain text recipe and the effect of presenting recipe steps in a dependency graph representation. Initial results indicate that cooks value pictures of interim goals states to compare their ingredients against, and prefer a graph representation of a recipe because it supports the cook's non-linear path through recipe instructions.