bon appétit

Design Challenge Theme:

Create an iOS native app centered on meal recommendations for bon appétit.

Discover

Audience

Bon Appétit is a food culture behemoth, with 6½ million monthly readers, almost 8 million unique digital users, plus videos and hosts that have gained cult followings.

Social media

The company found that 64 percent of Bon Appétit's social media audience is between the ages of 18 to 34, while that demographic makes up about 21 percent of the print audience.

Consolidation

Conde Nast recently folded epicurious into bon appétit. Epicurious has an app, bon appetit does not.

Points in brief to consider (client perspective):

App features

iOS App based on nutritional plan, calorie intake, and goals (my immediate assumption: Noom and My Fitness Pro have this capability)

Neural recommendation engines

Research neural recommendation engines (immediate assumptions i.e. Seamless, Neflix, etc)

Existing ML technology

Existing ML technology: (i.e. My Fitness Pro-it’s a free app that I can use to demonstrate my MVP)

Comparative Analysis

Survey Insights

21 respondents

Using apps to track nutrition

  • 81% do not use apps to track nutrition (17 out of 21 responses)

  • Another way of looking at it: 19% do.

The reasons why not:

  • Too much effort, not organized enough

  • Don’t need to

How do you plan your meals?

I asked the participants its to select all the ways they make decisions regarding how they plan their meals.

Where do you find your recipes?

Personas

How Might We?

How might we make it easier for Sonia to log her meals into another platform?

How might we make it easier for Steve to access Bon Appétit's editorial content, recipes, and create shopping lists?

How might we make it easier for Steve and Sonia to search the Bon Appétit's platform based on food and dietary preferences?

MVPs

Features

Partner with existing nutrition apps to log calories without leaving the recipe page.

Preferences

In the preference panel, the user can select to:

  • show nutritional information

  • and/or select 3rd party apps such as My Fitness Pal or Noom to sync data

  • chose food and dietary preferences

Recommendation engines & machine learning

Based on users previous searches and dietary preferences

User Flows

Adding data to 3rd party apps

 1. click recipe to prepare

 2. scroll down to log recipe

 3. overlay opens to recipe data to log meal

4. user clicks on ”log meal”

5. User can than close overlay to go back to bon appetit’s recipe page

Style Guide

Using bon appetit’s website as a reference, I created this matching style guide for the mobile app

High Fidelity

Next steps

Since Epicurious already has most of the features Steve and Sonia want, study rebranding the app under the Bon Appétit name.