Discipline
UX Research, UI/UX Design
Timeline
January 2021 - May 2021
Tools
UX Research Methodologies, Affinity Mapping, Ideation, Prototyping, Figma, User Testing
Role
Product Design Consultant, User Research Lead
Team
Jennifer Tran (Mentor), Jihyun Kim, Jessica Huang, Etheline Nguyen
Overview
A necessity by human nature, food is a medium that genuinely connects everyone. From fond memories of our grandmother’s home cooked meals to figuring out how to cook on your own for the first time, it is often deeply entwined with our experiences, both individual and collective. Food is a universal language.
Food52 is an online platform on a mission to to help everyone enjoy life’s most important pleasures – food, home and connection to others. With “connection to others” as an integral aspect of their mission, Food52 deeply values the community around their brand. But even with 2 million + registered community members and a 16% year over year growth, the amount of monthly active users is quite low. Thus, Food52 came to us with this prompt:
How might we ensure our community offerings meet the needs of our existing members?
Considering Food52’s goals for their online community, my team at Berkeley Innovation created mobile app designs for features intentionally aimed at fostering genuine and authentic community interactions. Originally, ‘Community’ was just a tab within Food52’s website. Our solution strives to change the community into a holistic experience, not confined to a single tab.
Context
When we came to Food52, the entirety of their community features were confined to a single tab. Within this tab of features included a hotline for asking questions, recipe contests, a review-driven product line called Five Two, and recipe submissions.
The commonality among all current community features is that they all required users to submit some form of original content. There was no way to participate in the Food52 community that didn’t require a high level of commitment.
Our Solution:
Core Experiences
Originally, Food52’s community features were confined to a singular tab on their website. Considering that Food52 deeply values community, we thought that a single tab was insufficient. We sought to bring the existing features out of a single tab and integrated them into the website as a whole.
With the knowledge that recipe inspiration is the primary use of Food52 as well as the fact that most of their traffic comes from mobile devices, we created mobile app features for Food52 that fostered community throughout the entire experience of finding a recipe.
Recipe Dashboard
Browse through recipes that are suggested based on your chosen tags, community favorites, staff picks, or user-created recipe collections.
Addressing Insight #3, the recipe dashboard emphasizes the humanity in Food52’s platform. In placing both regular users and Food52 chefs in the “Featured” section, we wanted to emphasize that at the end of the day, everyone in the Food52 community is just another person passionate about food.
Community, throughout the process
Instead of scrolling to the bottom of the recipe to look at reviews, get a quick briefing of the most relevant and credible advice at the beginning so you can read them before cooking.
As you cook, utilize a video walkthrough that presents the original directions alongside the most relevant tips for each step from other community members.
Addressing Insight #1, we gave community-generated advice a more visible position, ending the need to scroll all the way down to the comments and emphasizing the community behind each recipe.
Reviews
Feel empowered to engage with the community through a friendly and intuitive review process. Let other community members know what you liked, didn’t like, or would do differently.
Addressing Insight #1 and Insight #2, we created an easier process for users to effectively express their comments or advice, fostering community participation.
Quickly upvote advice that came in handy while cooking to help other users in their cooking journey. Interact with the community in an easy way that does not require the effort of original content.
Addressing Insight #1, reactions lower the barrier of entry into the community, allowing users to contribute in a low-commitment way.
Reactions
Collections
Add recipes to a collaborative collection to keep track of your favorites, and also give inspiration to other community members with similar taste palates.
Addressing Insight #1, we designed the collections to involve Food52 members through the ability to share and add other users, emphasizing community within recipe inspiration. Addressing Insight #2, we brought the community into saving recipes, which users already do, creating another low-commitment avenue into participating in the Food52 community.
Profiles
Find fellow community members with whom you share things in common. See the Food52 community through a humanized lens in profiles that give a glimpse into who members are.
Addressing Insight #1 and Insight #2, we designed the profiles to humanize the people within the Food52 community, again emphasizing that the people reacting, commenting, and sharing are real people.
Research
Food and community mean a lot to people. We interviewed different people across age ranges who frequented online food platforms, including Food52. Through our surveys and interviews, we gained a deeper understanding into what food means to people, how food is related to community, and how people interact with others online.
Synthesis
Insight #1: Users intentionally seek credibility from other users when looking for a recipe.
“A lot of credibility comes from comments. The rating system for recipes, whether it be stars or reviews, is a helpful indicator of quality. I am unlikely to view unrated recipes.” - Natalie
Insight #2: Current community offerings are too high-commitment and intimidating, creating lurkers, not community members.
“Posting a comment or review is intimidating enough. There is even less incentive to share and contribute to an online community of strangers” - Vincent
“I am more of a lurker than a creator, it’s hard to consider myself a part of the community since I don’t contribute” - Rachel
Insight #3: Embracing mistakes breeds authenticity and approachability.
“Through showcasing mistakes of their featured chefs, Food52 places more emphasis on being born from the people. Openness about mistakes comes across as trustworthy, rather than a disingenuous revenue stream.” - Stacy
Ideation
Through our research synthesis, we came up with our refined “how might we” statement:
How might we incorporate community as a holistic experience on Food52’s platform?
Our focus in ideation was to create a design solution that would allow community members to participate in community in more accessible ways, bring community into the process of finding a recipe, and ultimately increase overall engagement.
Through some ideation sessions, we came up with a wide range of ideas, including a trending posts feature, personalized feeds, more personalized profiles of community members, shared recipe boards, and more.
During ideation, we were wary of creating something that was too close to existing apps. We didn’t want to make Food52 into Instagram or Pinterest. With this in mind, we sought to leverage the reasons why people already and continue to love Food52.
The main reason for traffic on Food52’s website is recipe inspiration. Accordingly, we decided to create community features around the experience of finding a recipe.
Prototyping
Initially, we started out by creating low-fidelity community features for Food52’s website. However, considering that the majority of Food52’s traffic is from mobile devices, we pivoted towards mobile app designs because we decided that a mobile application would better foster community.
Notable Changes
Hiding “Top Advice” from video walkthrough
Originally, the top advice feature was included in both the recipe itself and the video walkthrough. However, we decided that having the top tips feature in the video walkthrough was both cluttered and repetitive. Accordingly, I moved the relevant tips into a drop-down, so a user would not be overloaded with tips, allowing the focus to be towards the video walkthrough while making the tips from the community still accessible.
Moving “Top Advice” to the forefront
Originally, I placed my relevant advice feature at the bottom of the recipe, preserving the standard recipe format. However, considering that reviews are a major factor considered in choosing a recipe, I decided to move them up to a more visible location. This allowed for quick, palatable summaries of information that users would usually have to scroll to the bottom for.
Previews in collections
Originally within the collection page, a user would have to navigate to the actual recipe page in order to find more information about the recipe. In an effort to improve the experience of quick perusal, I created a preview feature, intuitively shown through the arrow, to increase accessibility to the most relevant information like cook time and serving size.
Impact
Currently, Food52 does not have any mobile experience. Through our project, we were able to show Food52 stakeholders what a mobile experience could look like for the online food platform. Working directly with Food52’s VP of Design and three product managers enabled us to interface frequently and offer insights to company stakeholders.
“It was such a pleasure seeing your process and seeing how the work evolved throughout the semester. You are all so talented! Really appreciate all the work you put into exploring this complex topic for us and we were so excited to see all the solutions you proposed and put together!”
- June Kim, VP of UX Design at Food52
Wishes
Interview more people within the Food52 age range
As college students, the target age range for Food52 was fairly inaccessible to us. While we were able to interview some people within the demographic, we struggled to find more people within an older age range. Through interviewing more people of an older age range, we could better address the generational differences that exist within Food52’s users.
Beyond social media
While the idea of community is interlaced with the idea of social media, we don’t want to just create Instagram on Food52’s platform. If given more time, I would want to explore how we could further redefine what an online community could mean to people.
Reflection
Organic growth over fabrication
We can’t force users to create a community. All we can do as a designer is provide the space and accessibility to do so. The power in community is the individual willingness of each member to be a part of something greater than themselves.
Intention behind the medium
We started on by creating wireframes for desktop but soon realized that the nature of what we wanted to create necessitated regularity and accessibility in a mobile application. Intention is required not only within the designs itself, but also in the vehicle in which these designs will meet the user.
