bon appétit
Design Challenge
Theme: Create an iOS native app centered on meal recommendations for bon appétit.
Solution: A product that provides a seamless user flow to users to log nutritional information into 3rd party calorie trackers.
My Role: Research and design
Programs used: Figma and Photoshop. Presentation was done in Power Point and Adobe Premiere.
The beginning
bon appétit is a food culture behemoth with 6.5 million monthly readers and almost 8 million unique digital users. Their videos and hosts have gained cult followings.
Publisher Condé Nast's research found that 64 percent of Bon Appetit's social media, while demographic makes up about 21 percent of the print audience. Recently, Condé Nast introduced a paywall and folded Epicurious into bon appétit.
Epicurious was my online go-to for years because they had recipes for bon appétit. My remit was to design an iOS App using neural recommendation engines and existing machine learning technology.
I love to cook, but I keep food diaries to keep track of my nutrition. If I'm cooking dinner, that means adding each ingredient and amount as a separate item, which is a real time suck. The recipes in nutrition apps taste like, well, recipes from nutrition apps.
bon appétit doesn't list the nutrition and calories–its content focuses on flavor, cooking methods, history of the dish, etc. It's for people who enjoy food. I get that, but I also want to track my calories without leaving the app. Having made an initial assumption, I began researching the market and users.
Research
Knowing that I had five days to research, design, and present my solution, I began the project by researching bon appétit, their market sector, and current offerings. Starting with my initial hypothesis and a quick survey of the industry, I created a survey and sent it out over my social media accounts and email blast. While waiting for responses, I reviewed their competitors offerings to make a competitive analysis.
How do you plan your meals?
Where do you find your recipes?
Survey Insights
My survey received 21 responses and focused on the primary remit: to create an iOS app for bon appétit using machine learning and neural recommendation engines. I had an initial hunch about what I wanted from the product, but I needed to find out if there was a market for that feature.
Most respondents found recipes online, with 20% already using bon appétit. And while 81% did not use apps to track nutrition, 19% did. For those that did not, one of the reasons was it took too much effort, and they weren't organized enough.
For those who said they didn't need to, bon appétit already had plenty of functionality to take care of what they wanted to do–to find exciting recipes. I had my MVP.
Comparative Analysis
My time was limited, but I was already familiar with this space. I have shelves of cookbooks and regularly use the bon appétit, Epicurious, and New York Times Cooking Section. I also use my fitness pro and have used Noom in the past.
These products hit different market sectors and did other things, but the common denominator was that they were platforms featuring meal consumption and preparation. Only bon appétit and Epicurious (since merged under the bon appétit brand by owner Condé Nast) didn't list nutritional information.
HungryGirl, delish, and Allrecipes business models focused on culling user data and advertising–and had a lot of distracting and unwanted content that the subscription-only sites didn't have.
Personas
After analyzing my survey results, I created two personas: Sonia and Steve. My MVP addresses both of their needs: to keep track of calories while providing a platform where they could discover new and interesting recipes.
How Might We?
bon appétit and Epicurious have robust options already built into their search functions: users can select recipes based on cuisine, ingredients, dietary preferences, food allergies, etc. By allowing users to refine their choices in the preference panel, they can personalize their experience.
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
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
Features
Partner with existing nutrition apps to log calories without leaving the recipe page.
Have a “read more” button that gives the user the option to read the recipe’s editorial content or skip to continue reading the directions.
User Flow
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
Users can log meals to their 3rd party nutrition tracker without leaving the bon appetit app and using a minimum amount of clicks.
High Fidelity
I matched the bon appétit website's sophisticated style to create this standalone app.
Next steps
Since Epicurious already has most of the features Steve and Sonia want, the next step would be to study how rebranding the app under the bon appétit name would be implemented.