Bringing a personal chef to your door, during COVID
Project: Site redesign for My Chef Lara
Role: Product Designer - UX / UI / Prototyping / Testing
The Problem
My Chef Lara is a personal chef company based in Providence, Rhode Island. They offer event catering, personal chef services, and a meal subscription service to individuals in the city. To make up for lost event business, during the COVID19 pandemic, My Chef Lara has focused exclusively on their meal subscription service. However their current site is outdated and no longer reflects their values of quality and professionalism nor does it enable the client to chef relationship that is crucial for the subscription services success.
Our Goal: Redesign the site to focus on the meal subscription business model and facilitate a relationship between a client and their personal chef.
Shifting the Business
My Chef Lara’s website has become an outdated information hub with poor visual hierarchy that is more likely to deter potential clients than convert them. The redesigned site would need to address these issues while also pivoting to focus on attracting meal delivery business.
The Meal Subscription Process
Problems in the Process
After receiving a menu from a chef, there is a long back and forth process to arrive at a good menu and some clients wonder if it’s worth the effort to get changes through.
Once they have received their meals, clients aren’t sure how or when to give feedback on the meals.
Hesitancies in communication have caused menus to stagnate as chefs stick to meals they think clients like, and the menus stop reflecting changes in a clients taste.
The New Process
The current process is slow, awkward, and stressful for clients. I wanted the new design to alleviate these pains by giving clients more control over the process and their menu.
Process to Get Here
Learning about the Business
While I was already familiar with the company I needed to understand the values and business goals, and to do that I interviewed the owner Norbert. I learned that the company serves professional clientele that value professionalism and personalized service. This was also an interesting time in the company as they are pivoting their business model to become focused solely on meal subscription and their new goal is to increase regular meal subscription customers by 50%.
Speaking with Customers
I learned how to company operated and who the clientele is, but I needed to understand a client’s experience first hand. My next step was speaking with 5 current meal subscription customers. I wanted to know:
What is the customer journey when signing up for service?
How do customers feel about the experience of scheduling a delivery of meals? What isn’t working and what can be improved?
Why does the customers use a meal subscription service?
Why they chose My Chef Lara?
What I learned
Speaking with current clients was amazingly insightful, my biggest insights were:
The service is exceptional and makes clients lives easier. “It gives me tremendous physical savings”
The customer feels like it us up to them to change the menu, but often struggle to do it.
Customers appreciate the complete flexibility in meal choices. “They will make whatever I want, they’ve never said ‘I can’t do that’.”
Some clients are tired of the things they always get, but don’t know what to put in its place.
From these insights it was clear that while a few customers want the same menu every time, most customers want increased variety, but they don’t seem to get it for various reasons. Knowing this I decided to focus my designs on giving clients increased control over their meals and facilitating feedback between the client and the chef.
Synthesizing the Findings
As part of my empathy process, I synthesized these customer insights into a persona. Creating this persona showed me the habits, behaviors, and needs of who I would be designing for.
Early Designs
Defining the visual aspects of the redesign while maintaining a cohesive and recognizable brand identity was a challenge. When I spoke with Norbert I asked about the values of the company and those were my first step towards crafting a new visual identity. Using the company values as my guiding principles, the site needed to evoke feelings of professionalism, modernity, and high quality service.
Testing the First Design
To get feedback early in the redesign, I mocked up a homepage and gathered 6 participants to run a closed word bank desirability study. I showed them this page and asked them what they thought. The most common words were Clean, Modern, Corporate, and Boring.
Follow up questions revealed that while people thought this company seemed high quality and professional, the design came off too sterile and business-like for such a personal service.
Redesign and Retest
Armed with the feedback I received from my first test I set out to make a friendlier more inviting homepage. I spread the information out across more sections, used photography that was more reminiscent of home cooking, added photos of chefs, and real testimonials of the service.
These changes went a long way towards cultivating the perception I wanted. I tested the new design using the same word bank as before and was rewarded with the more positive attributes of Modern, Clear, Approachable, and Professional.
Defining the Focus
To design the information architecture for the new site I first defined the most important pages and user flows, which are the Sign up and Menu pages.
The new site map is simplified and focused on helping new users sign up or existing users to schedule their service. Cutting most of the pages from the old site was a hard decision, but necessary to focus on pivoting towards the new business goals.
Improving the Sign Up
As part of the sign up process every client has an hour long interview with a chef where they discuss their dietary restrictions, goals, and tastes. I saw an opportunity to improve the sign up process by having a client input some basic information before speaking with a chef. This will allow the discussion to stay focused on a clients goals and taste profiles.
Testing and Results
Once the initial wireframes were done, I created an interactive prototype in Figma and conducted remote moderated usability testing with 6 participants who have used other meal subscription services. During testing I asked participants to sign up, review their current menu, and make changes to their upcoming menu.
Positive Feedback
Signing up: Participants liked that the sign up process was broken up into different steps. They felt that it was a simple and easy to follow process.
Menus: Every participant was able to change their meal for a different one on the first attempt. They liked the detailed information and pictures, they felt like it gave them a good idea of what to expect.
Areas of Opportunity
Lack of System Feedback: When signing up for the service, scheduling a delivery, and changing menu items participants were unsure if they had successfully completed their intended actions.
The Fix - Messages and Notifications: To address this lack of feedback I added confirmation messages and notifications at steps along the critical path. For example, during the test when a user exchanged an upcoming menu item for a different one, the new meal would be reflected in the menu, but testers didn’t always notice that. To make things clearer I added a confirmation modal as the final step to changing a menu and a notification on the following page to inform the user that a change had been made.
Reflection
This project was an excellent exercise in focusing on a problem. Shifting a site towards a new business model isn’t easy, but by identifying the goals of the business and the user, I was able to create a focused solution to meet the needs of both.