In the Kitchen
In the Kitchen, Food Network’s recipe app, attracts over 800k monthly active users looking to find recipes they’ve seen their favorite chefs cook on tv or to discover new recipes developed in the Food Network Kitchens. I selected a few projects to showcase below that demonstrate the range of work from mobile to tv.
⭐️ Rated 4.9 stars in the app store with over 515k reviews
🏆 2018 Digiday Publishing Awards – Best Mobile Innovation
Designing for tvOS
In May 2018, Food Network launched its second Apple TV app. Up until this point, all the other TV apps in the Scripps/Discovery network were more traditional video first apps. The existing Food Network Watch app allowed you to watch the episodes from Food Network channel on demand. We had to break that traditional mold for the In the Kitchen app, as we needed to show written recipes. One of our goals at the time was to incorporate more fun and entertainment into what’s a very utility-based app. TvOS seemed like a good way to explore this mix of utility and entertainment but with the focus on entertainment first.
Recipe Page: While we were able to rely on Apple’s templates for most of the app, the Recipe page was where we spent most of our time as we had to create a completely custom template. We knew we wanted to go video first, as opposed to recipe first like the mobile app.
User Testing: Since the concept of reading a recipe off your TV while cooking is completely new, we made sure to run several rounds of user testing with prototypes prior to building the feature. This allowed us to gather learnings and iterate quickly. One important thing to note is that due to a very condensed timeline for this feature we planned on launching a very streamlined app, with a lot less functionality than our mobile app. The feedback we got in the first round of testing was crucial in that it proved some of our assumptions incorrect. We learned that very few people have TVs in their kitchen or even visible from their kitchen. The use case here is not actually to cook while watching on your tv but instead of leisurely browse through cooking videos in an entertainment form and then go back and cook the recipes later from your phone or iPad. Therefore, is this streamlined MVP app we were planning on launching useful to users – no it’s not. We learned that we could not launch without our full recipe box functionality in the MVP. We needed to allow users to be able to save recipes from their TV and easily open them on their mobile app. This also meant building out a login flow so that the users recipe box would sync across all their devices.
Onboarding: Another thing we learned from user testing is that we needed to onboard users to new gestures that are unique to our app. People missed the subtle queues in the prototype, especially how to get from video to a recipe and how to save recipes. The challenge was to add just enough onboarding, and contextually. Because we were able to prototype quickly and get these insight quickly we were able to pivot and launch a great MVP.
AR Cupcakes
We partnered with Apple to create a fun and immersive AR experience within our app to coincide with Apple’s iOS 11 ARKit release. This feature allows for users to create and decorate cupcakes in their own environment. My role in this project was working on the latest UX updates for adding stickers and frames to your scene as well as new sharing options. My role later included scaling this feature for Android ARCore.
Android
Personalization
Of the numerous new features I worked on for the iOS app, the most recent (Nov 2018) was the addition of personalization into the app. Our goal was to help users find more relevant content, faster. The design challenge was to differentiate this experience from our editorial curated content. The first part of this project include a new tab on the Explore page, ‘For You,’ that gives the logged in users easy access to recently viewed recipes, recipes from TV shows they like and daily dinner recommendation from their favorite chefs. The second part of the project is an onboarding flow that allows users to record their preferences on chefs, cooking styles, diets and allergies so we can present the user with recipes perfect for their circumstances. We got to have a lot of fun with this project – I even baked the cake we used for the loading state!
Search
I worked on enhancing the user experience for searching for recipes within the app as well as searching within a users saved recipes. In order to promote filters, a tool that was used very little in the past, we added the filters on the search landing page as well as a sticky filter button to the search results page. Another new addition is the use of suggested search terms. Upon searching for a keyword the user is presented with a horizontal scrolling list of prefixes or related terms to make the search more specific.
Within a users saved recipes we added the ability to search but also the tabs to easily filter between saved recipes, videos, recipe collections or your personal boards (which are collections the user curates as opposed to the editorially curated collections). With these additions we are hoping to create a more guided search experience and to get the user to what they are looking for faster.
