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Erin decides poached eggs and asparagus sounds good, so she clicks on it. It brings up a pop up page containing the recipe from an external recipe site.
In several parts of this design, it was difficult to achieve both efficiency and learnability. For instance, the thumbnail page presents a lot of information to the user at once, but it is quite efficient because an experienced user could quickly glance at the information, process it, and perform selections and actions on many food items at a time. However, a new user may not understand what the pictures, progress bars, icons, and check marks on this page mean. Specifically, the food location icon at the top right corner of each thumbnail might be confusing (refrigerator, cabinet, ice). They may also not know what the progress bar indicating time until expiration means. The tabbed organization of the website as a whole also represents a battle between efficiency and learnability. It would be possible to combine all the functionality thats separated into these tabs into one page. For instance, a recipe search could be done efficiently from the food page by selecting foods and clicking a "find recipes" button. However, from a learnability standpoint it made more sense to keep the site more modular. If you want to do something, you go to the corresponding page. This gives new user a clearer idea of what goes on where. Overall, this design has good visibility. The state of the program (the current foods the user has, their food budget, etc.) is presented to the user with graphs, charts, and pictures of their foods. There are strengths and weaknesses in error prevention/correction in this design. Though there are many text boxes to fill in while entering foods, autocompletion and predictions about the user's entries can easily help them fill in the fields quickly (also an efficiency benefit) and generally without error.