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If Erin had not selected ingredients, and had simply clicked on the recipes icon or column from the welcome screen, the page would have looked like this.
Evaluation:
Learnability:
This design favors learnability, since it has an initial welcome screen with descriptions on what to do. There are some things that are not as learnable though. For instance, the check boxes on the food page that allow a user toAgain, the check boxes mentioned in learnability are also not as visible as some other aspects.
search for a recipe from those items has no affordances. A user would have to click them to find out what happens, or go through a tutorial.
The toolbar at the bottom is also unusual. Although it makes things more visible and efficient in the long run (since it floats and is always visible), it is a little more difficult to get used to than more popular navigation methods, with selection on the top or left side.
Visibility:
In general, most things are visible in this design. Each page displays all the information at once. An example of this is that the recipe page shows recipes returned from the search (or if there was no search then popular recipes or recipes you can make) on the left, and specific recipe details on the right. This omits lots of clicking the back button to see the list again (which increases efficiency also).
Efficiency:
This design also tries to make things efficient for the user. Autocomplete and filling in defaults is an example. Also, the fact that the input field to add new food is at the top of the screen instead of in a modal dialog makes it easier for the user to add things instantaneously. The check boxes on the food page are an example of choosing efficiency over learnability. Since the user only has to learn this feature once, and it is a more advanced feature, he can check items more quickly than going to the recipe page and entering that information there. A problem with efficiency is that the user enters a price for each item, instead of listing all the items on a grocery list with one price. This is a trade-off with the accuracy of the data, though, since it could be useful to the user to know how much was spent on which items.
Error Prevention:
One of the things designed for error prevention was putting the check box for recipe searching on the left of the food items, instead of the right. Putting this on the right would mean it is near the delete button, and that could cause errors. This design tries to keep those types of buttons apart. A weakness of this design in this area is the default values automatically completed. A user may enter an item and not want the default values, but automatically click enter because it is the easiest thing to do. This is a trade-off with efficiency.