Problem
After interviewing it’s users regarding their eating habits Gousto discovered that while people want to eat at home and cook their own meals, they cited “lack of time” as their main reason for not cooking. Users also plan poorly which leads to bad decisions at the supermarket and having to throw out spoiled food.
I chose Jackie as my primary persona, with Gilbert as the secondary persona. As a representative of Gousto users Jackie aims to cook 4 nights per week and is concerned about her health and food wastage. She finds delivery times inconvenient and would like more choices for after work delivery.
User research
I interviewed a friend who is in a similar demographic to Jackie and has shopped for groceries online as well as used the web to get inspiration to cook, which she aims to do several times per week. Her experience has since lead her to stop using these services, and talking to her helped me develop the problem user flows.
She mentioned several points that influenced my design:
She prefers to do most of her research on one site, BBC GoodFood, which has good pictures and encourages browsing.
She doesn’t like the shopping at the supermarket because it’s easy to be distracted by products, even when you have a shopping list.
Sites like HelloFresh don’t offer enough choice
During the card sorting exercise at Old street station I was able to ask one of our participants about his experiences with HelloFresh, a competitor of Gousto. He he also mentioned the lack of flexibility in terms of the meal options, and that the delivery times were very broad, eg 8am - 10pm which didn’t work for him.
Competitive analysis
For the competitive analysis I chose to analyse HelloFresh, Riverford Organic Farms, MarleySpoon (all direct competitors) as well as Waitrose and BBC GoodFood.
Other delivery services like Gousto also have limited delivery options, often only delivering two or three days per week within a broad time frame. Waitrose enables you to choose a 1 hour time slot from the following day onwards, which I then combined with the simpler layout from Instacart in my final iteration.
In terms of offering inspiration, Waitrose and especially BBC GoodFood, have good images, and many options to choose from and browse. Sometimes too many, and the navigation on these sites can be confusing, but many of the smaller details of how they present recipes, sharing and saving have influenced my design.
Card sorting and sitemap
This gave some structure to the ingredients Gousto provides, it was interesting to see how different people sort items, whether that is based on the type of item e.g. Vegetables, Meat, or where it is found in the supermarket eg baking. Ultimately I went with the simpler structure of type of food, as during the card sorting exercise most people went with these types of criteria.
User flows and user journey
Task analysis based on observations during user research and my own research, helped highlight the problem areas, particularly those places where a lot of steps were required to achieve a single task.
From the task analysis I mapped out the process and decisions a user takes through the process of finding recipes, organising them, and purchasing the ingredients online. This helped me to map the emotional response to different stages of the process.
Method & Results of Testing
Design studio to get ideas out in quick succession and iterate on them with feedback from a group. This was really useful, and was good to get thoughts on what worked and what didn’t, as well as to get further ideas that could then be used in designs.
Keeping in mind that the users of Gousto wanted something that is quick and easy to use, provides inspiration and supports felixiblity to tailor recipes and deliveries, I created some sketches to support this.
User testing with these showed that they were oversimplfied, and too visual, which, instead of making it easier to use, caused confusion. My next iteration used more text to give guidance, and added a menu to the top of the page so that people could access the main features.
Final Resolution
The site has quite a flat navigational structure - tips and overlays help to keep things on the same page. There is the option to remove items that the user doesn’t need, and the system remembers these and will remember next time you order a meal with this ingredient, letting you add it again if you need it.
You can also add individual items to orders - to help you make something out of any left overs. All orders can be tailored to the number of people you want to serve, so you are covered whether you are cooking for 2 or 10.
Next Steps
I would like to build out the training and classes elements of the site, as well as integrate these elements into the recipes themselves. Additionally I would like to have more suggestions based on favorites and viewed recipes. Finally, Gilbert wanted live chat, and adding this into the site would benefit him.
Prototype: http://invis.io/CX3ENKMWA
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