01. Brief / Overview
Perdue Farms is fourth-generation, family owned, U.S. food and agriculture company. They are the number-one brand of fresh chicken in the U.S., and the company is the leader in organic chicken in the United States. Additionally, Perdue AgriBusiness is an international agricultural products and services company. In terms of digital presence they couple informational websites which mostly represents their brand. As of December 2019 they are moving in to direct-to-consumer e-commerce to sell around 100 of their frozen meat products. With this effort they plan to improve experience of customers with Perdue products, educate them about standards as well as generate revenue.
After going through site analytics data Perdue Farms determined that most of their informational site’s traffic was associated with their recipe section. For that reason after launching the main checkout functionality as a next step they continued with the site unification effort, combining the recipe section with the checkout process.
In a 9-day sprint, the goal was to design a forward-thinking, short-term implementation oriented convenient recipe section for Perdue Farms’ mobile website. The primary challenge was to unify UI of both experiences in order to improve recipe to checkout experience with enhanced content and flow. The recipe section was intended to satisfy the enterprise goals without sacrificing the consumer focus.
The Gap: how might we enhance the user experience in recipe usage, recipe sharing & product purchasing?
02. Business Analysis
I had the privilege of speaking to two of the stakeholders spearheading this project, VP Ecommerce Operations, Kat Alderman and SVP Ecommerce, David Zucker who defined project scope and goals as:
- Recipe Utilization: Users to use it in their day to day lives.
- Engagement: Users to stay as long as possible on the page.
- Social Shares: Users to tell their friends about this section.
- 3rd Party Vendors: Leverage their relationship with their partners.
To initiate the process, I approached the challenge by performing a business analysis. First, I wanted to understand our current competition and where they stand in the industry. I defined current competitors that have a similar recipe atmosphere, such as Tyson, Carrefour, Target, Walmart, Hello Fresh, Omaha Steaks and Yummly. Applying a competitive feature analysis framework, I identified that all of these brands were lacking proper user engagement and recipe management. Going through Market Positioning practice, I identified gaps in the market, which helped me to position for the blue ocean for Perdue Farms by continuing offering specialized premium natural food and adding a frictionless personalized recipe to the delivery process.
03. User Research
Perdue Farms conducted over 1,000 surveys providing comprehensive user research on direct to consumer trends to understand the type of user that is currently interested in their product. Below are some of their findings:
- 87% of consumers cooks their own meal
- 79% meat buyers would consider D2C
- 82% buyers expect trusted food
I wanted to learn more about the users’ habits when using recipes. I began my primary research by sending out surveys and conducting six Guerrilla-Style user interviews, focusing to identify commonalities in quantitative and qualitative data. As a result of the interviews, below are some of the insights that really stood out to us:
``I'm a picky eater and always want to know the ingredients that go into my food.``
``I do not want to see too much irrelevant content before seeing the actual recipe.``
``I'm not a fan of pre-packaged meals, I want to have control over my ingredients.``
04. User Persona
Using information from research, surveys and guerrilla interviews, we developed a persona to represent realistic personality profiles of prospective users. Gourmet George represents a tech-savvy male who would be the target audience for Perdue Farms. I used this persona constantly throughout the project to guide design decisions, priorities, and create empathy amongst the stakeholders and myself.
Breaking down George’s steps, I used experience mapping techniques to visualize and communicate the users end‐to‐end experience across various touchpoints with the pattern. This represented user pain‐points and see where I needed to focus my attention. Mapping out the user’s emotions was key to setting client expectations about the self-improving emotional state we were aiming to design for.
05. Ideation
Synthesizing goals from our research served as a lens through which we could consider not only what the mobile website should do, but also how it should feel. We believed this would be the difference between delivering a good experience and a great one. Thinking about emotional design early on helped our client understand the importance of aesthetics and tone of voice to the experience. Ideas were correlated and cluster together, patterns were identified, then pulled out and ideated upon further. Affinity Mapping helped me see the trends amongst the data and help me organize and prioritize the pains and gains.
Breaking down George’s steps, I used experience mapping techniques to visualize and communicate the users end‐to‐end experience across various touchpoints with the pattern. This represented user pain‐points and see where I needed to focus my attention. Mapping out the user’s emotions was key to setting client expectations about the self-improving emotional state we were aiming to design for.
Focusing all of the data on the main pains and gains to establish a base foundation to improve users experience both before and during the checkout. Using a MoSCoW method, I narrowed down functionalities feature and defined next steps and what to focus on during the UI process.
Perdue Farms’ recipe section is a mobile website that allows users to:
- Create personalized recipes
- Save to categorized folders
- Access to nutritional facts
- Flow from recipe to checkout without any friction
- Choose from various delivery options
- Checkout from other vendors
- Select ingredients to purchase
- Share experiences in social media
Wireframes and paper prototypes were created, then tested with users in order to determine which of the high-level approaches were the most functional, easy to understand, and impactful to potential users. Starting broad, our vision began evolving into something tangible. A high‐level design language, interactions and the website’s anatomy began to piece together. This process was repeated through multiple design iterations to quickly validate or eliminate design approaches. Using the sketches, we tested the flow and terminology to make sure it was as concise and usable as possible.
06. Mobile Experience
After focusing in on a single direction, the detailed design of the system and interaction patterns that would bring the feature to life began. The prototype demonstrates the previously mentioned user flow. Initially, we began the process by creating an atomic design inventory that helped us speed up the process, keeping the design integrity and minimizing error by having pre-set building blocks. To recap the user’s objective is to find a recipe, buy the items that are needed and later on share his tip/experience with the community. The prototype was broken down into two use cases:
07. Key Learnings & Next Steps
The most important takeaway from this design challenge was an open dialogue with the main stakeholders early and often not only fosters inclusion, it also ensures that the functionality being envisioned can be built, if any blockers exist, what front and back-end development resources will be needed, and how releases can be sequenced to get a product out of the door as quickly as possible.
Speaking with stakeholders and understanding their needs, they wanted something tangible and short term oriented. Building the foundation for this recipe section was the key for their growth. As the next steps, the recipe experience can be expanded by complimentary features, as:
Scheduling: Providing ability to plan multiple deliveries to the future
Full page mode: Presentation slider like cooking steps for mobile and watch
Public sharing: Allowing users to control access to their saved recipes’ or folders
Customization / Creation: Allowing users to create recipes that has at least one Perdue item
Multi-vendor checkout: Allowing users to buy proteins from Perdue and rest from other vendors
Gamification and promo codes: Encouragement to create content which improve site’s footprint and exposure
