How to boil an egg | Hannah Smith

The perverse incentives of online recipe websites promise to serve user needs but instead bury the information we are seeking in a labyrinth of distractions and anecdotes. Designed to prioritise the needs of the author above their readers, information as simple as ‘how to boil an egg’ can be difficult to find, concealed on a website that is frustrating to navigate.

The author’s quest for personal gain through clicks and income is often achieved through use of adverts, tag words, and phrases to create as much ‘content’ as possible. Readers are required to interact with multiple layers of distraction at different points throughout the experience. For example, a pop-up advert that fills the screen and obscures the recipe information must be clicked on to be removed, or to be reduce in scale only to pop-up again later in a different position, creating a fluid, evolving, non-linear narrative.

‘How to boil an egg’ is a light-hearted commentary on these incentives that explores the benefits, and limitations, of hybrid publishing. Both my digital and print publications contain the same content to convey the core characteristics of this experience.