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Role
Lead Product Designer

Tools
Figma, Miro, Slack, Google Suite, Zoom
Company
Joel's Kitchen

Location
Denver, CO

Dates

August 2023 (& ongoing)

Joel's Kitchen
Building an app for recipe sharing and socializing 

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The design challenge 

While Joel’s Kitchen acknowledges that other apps exist for recipe searching, there is a gap when it comes to using recipes as a way to build a community around the love of food.​

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In fact, food bloggers have 4x as many followers on social platforms as other industries. This demonstrates the need to provide a platform specifically for this purpose.

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After some initial excitement around the app, Joel and team noticed a dropoff in downloads and participation. I joined the team to design a solution to this problem: How might we increase downloads and signups on the app and motivate users to continue to return and post?

The Company & Objective 

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Since launching in 2014, Joel’s Kitchen has grown rapidly as a mobile app and website for home cooks, bloggers, and foodies alike looking for a way to share their passion for food with an online community.  Currently, there are no other social media platforms specifically catering to food lovers & recipe sharing. 

Joel's Kitchen is the best cooking community on the planet. Our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. The platform is a home for creative expression through original content that creates a genuine, inspiring, and joyful experience.

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-Joel Ross, Founder

Research & Analysis 

The first thing I did was to observe a usability test which I conducted with a couple of potential users on the original app.  A few pain points and complaints were called out below:

Two of the most important takeaways from the user test were:

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There is no current incentive to share and come back into the app without a robust community.

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We MUST make the user's experience much more intuitive and seamless.

Next, I interviewed our team members Joel (founder) and Ben (development) to gain insights on the needs and business goals.

Business Goals

maximize engagement with incentives

offer new growth opportunities for creators

increase app usage and new signups

User Needs

connection and community

incentive and rewards to engage

a fun experience

We decided to design a solution to this issue by creating challenges within the app.  The challenges are fun and competitive ways to grow engagement in which users can submit entries for cash prizes and gain an "award" on their profile if declared a winner (similar to a verification).  Any account (or Joel's Kitchen) can launch a challenge by inviting other users to join and post their entry for "World's Best Cookie Recipe" or "Pasta Night Favorites." We will track entries and engagement on each one to determine the winner or winners.

Problem Statement 

Joel's Kitchen experienced a surge of signups after its initial launch, but motivating users to return and engage with the platform has been the company's biggest challenge. The main issue we aim to address is the lack of community interaction and communication channels. We plan to introduce challenges as a way to reengage the community and make the platform more exciting for users.

Design

I began with a user flow of how I saw challenges fitting into the current app.  In addition to finding them through the + Create button, we knew we would need to push the feature in other ways. 

With my user flow in mind I began to visualize the layout for theapp’s interface and how a user might find the challenges to join.  Based on research of common social media apps, I determided we would need a bottom nav bar, and infinite scroll feature to get started. Then from the home stream you could navigate into our explore page where you would be exposed to a variety of new and exciting food content, recipes and of course our featured challenges. 

Next, I moved onto low-fidelity wire frames to show the layout and the journey to present to Joel for feedback.  To keep users engaged and coming back to the platform, they need a way to discover new challenges to participate in and view exciting content, recipes, and creators.  Therefore, we added an Explore page that features new and popular content and challenges.  

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UI Style Guide

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Implementation

From there, I created the high-fidelity prototype in Figma and got it ready to hand off to development and bring the design to life! Throughout development, I stayed close to the project to ensure the integrity of the design carried through to the app.  

This is an example of the journey a user would take to create a challenge within the Joel's Kitchen app. ​

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Once a Creative Challenge is approved and posted, the screens below show how a potential participant would navigate to it and get more information. 

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            Explore page                                      Entries & Preview                        Challenge Details & Join

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Usability Testing

From there, I moved onto usability testing. I tested the live platform with a sample group of users to validate its usability and gather further feedback by laying out a set of tasks to observe users completing so we could look for any areas to improve.  The testing highlighted some prototyping errors and areas where the UI felt confusing.   I iterated on those areas that were lacking and found that there are a few ways I could simplify navigation.

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An example of one of these areas was the progression of screens for adding a challenge.  As test users moved through the flow of this feature, some of the remarks we recieved had to do with not knowing where they were in the process or how many more screens they would need to click through.  In order to fix this, I provided a visual guide showing the number of steps and where the user was in the process.  A simple progress indicator was necessary to keep users engaged and moving through the screens.  

Where can we go from here?

I learned so much on this fast paced phase of the project.  We are continuing to build the app and website and I am proud of how far we've come.  Working as a solo designer comes with a lot of nuanced challenges.  For example, feedback and peer review is of crucial importance when designing.  Because I am a team of 1, it was imperative that I seek out fellow designers to collaborated and glean insights from.  

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One of the key learnings after launching this feature on the app is that users are in need of a tutorial or onboarding that would help them understand exactly what a challenge is and how it works... and why they might want to join in!

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Future development will hopefully include challenges sponsored by food businesses looking to expand their influencer marketing impact and advertise their brand to a new audience.  

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