What Ina Garten Can Teach Us About Good UX Writing
Whether you making chocolate chip cookies for a potluck or soup for a winter evening, chances are, you are using a recipe. With a list of measured ingredients and a set of instructions for assembling them, a recipe facilitates the interaction between you and the food or drink that you are preparing.
Recipe writing is much like user experience (UX) writing in that both require simple, clear language to help you navigate specific interactions. The recipe interface could be the digital screen on your tablet or a stain-splattered index card handed down from your mother, but either needs to easily walk you through a series of instructions to help you reach your goal, just like your rideshare app would do for picking up you and a friend at a specific location or a banking platform would do for making a deposit.
Celebrity cookbook author and television host Ina Garten is the queen of recipe writing. Over the summer, she posted to her Instagram feed a bouquet of light green hydrangeas. They looked as if she had just plucked them from her East Hampton garden. “Simple is always better! Have a wonderful weekend! #hydrangeas #summer”, her caption read. Simple really is better — Garten knows because she has built her brand on simple, clear writing.
According to her publisher, Clarkson Potter, the first nine books have a cumulative 10 million copies in print, and her latest, 2016’s Cooking with Jeffrey, held down the top spot on the New York Times “Food and Diet” Best Sellers list. Many of her titles contain a variation of the world “simple” — there’s her very first, 1999’s The Barefoot Contessa cookbook: Secrets from the East Hampton specialty food store for simple food and party platters you can make at home; 2010’s Barefoot Contessa How easy is that?: Fabulous recipes & easy tips; and 2012’s Barefoot Contessa Foolproof: Recipes you can trust, to name a few.
The content of Garten’s cookbooks accomplishes the premise of her cookbook titles. Through plain language, Garten guides home cooks of any level through her recipes. During a July 2017 interview with PBS news, she shared, “When I first started writing cookbooks, I said to myself, ‘What makes me think I can write a cookbook? There are these great chefs who are really trained.’ And as I started, I realized, what [I] lack is actually exactly right [as a strength] — because I can connect,” she said. “Cooking is hard for me. That’s why my recipes are really simple because I want to be able to do them.”
Here are three key steps that Ina embraces to make her recipes easy to use by home cooks that also apply to UX writing:
1. Observe your audience to understand how to write to them.
Because a cookbook author may have years of professional experience cooking, they may not fall under their target audience. Observing your audience within the context of their kitchens and grocery stores can uncover insights into how they approach cooking — and how you can meet them where they are at through your writing. During the 2015 Cherry Bombe Jubilee, Garten told the audience about a particular encounter she had with a friend learning to cook:
I actually did something once where I took a friend who wanted to learn how to cook and went to the grocery store with him because I needed to know. Half of it is, do you get the right ingredients? So I gave him the recipe for pesto because he wanted to make pasta pesto, and I wanted to show him how to do it. And he got to the basil, and he said, “Is this dry or is it fresh?” And I went, “Oh, that is really interesting.” It never would have occurred to me because I knew what pesto is. So from then on, I always wrote “fresh basil” in the recipe. Most people know that pesto is fresh basil, but for those people who don’t, the question is answered right there in the recipe.
2. Use simple, clear language to build trust and make it accessible.
Ina starts with the assumption that her readers may not know everything that she does about cooking. Her recipes often contain parentheses with measurement or ingredient clarifications. She also sometimes uses additional photos with captions in her recipes to help prepare the reader: For example, her Skillet Brownies recipe in Make It Ahead: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook has a sidebar image of cast iron skillets with a caption detailing the size that she uses for the recipe. In another Make It Ahead recipe for Lemon Ginger Molasses Cake, she includes an image of a key ingredient, crystallized ginger, with the caption, “Crystallized ginger is dried, not in syrup,” so readers know what to look for at their local market. Coupled with images, Garten’s writing becomes a source of trust for home cooks to feel confident in the kitchen.
3. Test your messaging with your audience before publishing it.
Observe your target audience interacting with your content. Ask them to think out loud as they are walking through it. Afterward, ask them questions: Was anything confusing? What would you do next? How would you describe this part to a friend? The insights that you gather from these observations are key to improving the content so that it better resonates with your target audience and meets their needs.
Garten does a great job of not only testing and iterating the recipe content herself but encouraging others to test it, too. Here’s Garten again at the 2015 Cherry Bombe Jubilee:
Every single recipe I make over and over and over again to make sure it’s right. I make it for my friends. I make it for [my husband] Jeffrey. I test it again because I mean, every time I work on a recipe, I change something. And then I hand it to [my assistant] Barbara Libath, who is a good home cook, and I watch her make it. And she does something I never would have imagined. And actually now after 15 years, Barbara is too good of a cook. So now we give it to [my assistant] Lidey Heuck, and she cooks it. And it’s just great to see what someone young would do with a printed page.
Good writing is so much more than words on a page.
It’s observing. It’s testing. It’s iterating. Good writing leads to readers accomplishing their goals. Garten’s writing is proof. I’ll leave you with this last gem of a quote from Garten’s Jubilee keynote:
It’s what kids in California call the user experience: How someone is going to use that printed page to make what it is that they want.
Amanda Kennedy is a freelance UX researcher and writer taking on new clients for 2018. Learn how you can work together on her web site, or send her an email at amandakennedyux@gmail.com.
