Blue Apron Community Feature

Prompt

Blue Apron is looking to increase user engagement on their site by allowing its users to create and submit their own recipes. Other blue apron customers will be able to vote on the submitted recipe and if a recipe receives enough votes, it can become a featured meal on Blue Apron for purchase.

Summary

As a team, we confirmed Blue Apron’s assumptions that integrating this feature would be addressing a user need and that it was the effective solution. After validating these assumptions, we then integrated this new feature into their existing mobile app, in which we designed, tested and iterated based off of user feedback. We then presented our findings to a group of mock-stakeholders.

Company

Blue Apron is a meal-kit delivery service that is passionate about building a better food system and standards.

User Interviews

In order to help us validate any assumptions and identify pain points with meal kit delivery services, we decided to conduct 5 user interviews. We wanted to make sure we interviewed users within our established target market, so we created and sent out a screener. From that screener, we sat down with 5 selected users and asked them open-ended questions about their experience with meal-kit delivery services, cooking habits, and online interactions.

Once we conducted the interviews, we used an affinity map to help synthesize the research to find patterns and themes amongst users. In order to further understand and empathize with the users, we created "I" statements for each category.

Key insights

• Users are limited on time and cooking must be low effort and easy
• Users are looking for a method to help them in the kitchen with their cooking skills
• Application must be easy to navigate
• Users would like recommendations on cooking techniques as well as recipes
• Users desire to save money

Personas

Now that we have gathered insights from users, we are able to define the user need to ensure we are designing the right thing.

After synthesizing the research, we created personas which capture the behaviors, needs, goals and pain points of our interviews through fictionalized people. We created 2 personas, a primary and secondary, based off of the different types of users that we interviewed.

Problem Statement

Understanding our Persona’s pain points and needs, we are able to formulate a problem statement for Blue Apron Users:

How might we help provide healthy, high-quality, money saving recipes that teach the users how to cook better?

Research
to Design

To address our problem statement, we came up with a design solution that aligned user insights with the Blue Apron proposal.

Design Studio & Prioritization

We came to this solution by conducting a prioritization matrix and MoSCoW map. Once prioritizing the features we wanted to include, we moved into a design studio to flush out our ideas and strategy.

Mid-Fidelity Prototype 

We then created a mid-fidelity prototype which included a 5th navigation button to “add a recipe”, a featured recipes pages that allowed users to vote, and integrated a “my submitted recipes” aspect to the user profile page as outlined in the research to design section.

Usability Test I

Once we finished flushing out the design, we put our mid-fidelity prototype to the test. We conducted our first round of usability test with 5 participants. We asked the participants about their experience using meal-kit delivery service apps, their first impressions of the app, 3 task-scenarios and final thoughts.

Overall, users had the easiest time with the third task and struggled the most on the second task. For task 2, many of the users went searching for the recipe via the recipes’ search function. Along with this, many users requested a back/edit function while submitting a recipe.

Iterations I & High-Fidelity

Based off the results of the usability test, we incorporated the changes and converted our prototype from mid-fidelity to high-fidelity.

Usability
Test II

After creating our high-fidelity prototype with the integrated changes from the first usability test, we conducted a second round of usability tests using the same script with 5 new participants.

With the exception of the success rate of Task 3, both the success rate and timing improved across the board.

Iterations II

From our second usability test, the most common patterns we saw was users trying to look under the “Recipes” tab to find “Add a Recipe” and “My Submitted Recipes” as well as getting confused around the voting features. In the next round of iterations, we addressed these issues as well as added a comment section.

Prototype

Next Steps

• Move into third round of usability testing to gain insights about the newly added comment feature
• To conduct further interview to gain a stronger understanding of what constitutes a community for Blue Apron users
• Integrate this new design across all of Blue Apron’s platforms

Reflection

Once thing I found fascinating was how informative a usability test is; it was very exciting to see how much we improved with the second round of usability tests. Something I learned from this process was how important it is to establish a strong problem statement before moving into design; having a good problem statement sets the framework and influence the direction of the design. Next time, I would like to take the opportunity to ask more questions in the user interviews: I felt we only began to scratch the surface.