WHAT WAS YORIPE TRYING TO SOLVE?
Yoripe's original aim was to help individual households reduce food waste from over-buying and mismanaging grocery expiry dates.
The founder had released on the app store, a beta MVP that was a cross between a kitchen inventory management tool and a grocery promotions noticeboard. However, user conversion and growth rates remained low and she did not sufficiently understand the market and its users.
I was hired to find a product-market fit, as well as revamp the existing product by developing prototypes for Demo-Day and version 1 release.
HIGH LEVEL TIMELINE
Total - 4.5 months,
3 phases: research, conceptualisation and validation
TOPICS COVERED
PROJECT SCENARIO
UX Researcher & Product Strategist leading a team of 1 UX/UI designer and 2 marketers
STRATEGY - WHO? WHAT? WHY?
Yoripe prioritised promotional tactics to incentivise price-conscious consumers to sign-up, with the value proposition of easy discovery and comparison of discounts and reduced-to-clear groceries across supermarket chains.
The team's decisions were being guided by their beliefs and assumptions about users and their stories, which at this point were only hypothetical in nature.
I reasoned that we needed to explore and answer the following questions instead:
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What is the current experience users have when interacting with the app?
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What pain point of our early adopters will we aim to solve? Why is it important to them?
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Who are our early adopters? - the users most likely to try our app first and evangelise for the brand
WHAT IS THE CURRENT EXPERIENCE USERS HAVE WHEN INTERACTING WITH THE APP?
HEURISTICS EVALUATION
To understand this, I mapped out the entire user flow of the current version 0.52 onto Overflow. Then I evaluated its heuristics using LEMERS principles and presented them to the team.
Users couldn't browse without signing up and affordances were either unconventional or unclear.
GUERILLA USABILITY TESTING
To get buy-in on my findings, we went on field trips to the Honestbee Habitat grocery store where we approached 3 shoppers.
I verified that they grocery shopped at least once a week before starting the usability test.
I met some resistance from the founder as hearing negative comments on her product was hard. But I managed to convince her that it's essential and valuable to listen to user feedback and learn from our mistakes.
TEST OBSERVATIONS
One tester, in particular, was disappointed with the lack of a relational link between the Kitchen and Promotion sections, as she expected a seamless integration between shortlisting the deals, reserving/purchasing the groceries and monitoring her inventory stock.
I noted 3 other observations that occurred most frequently:
SLOW RESPONSE TIMES
At various points, the app took more than 5s to load results.
MISLEADING USER INTERFACE
Users misunderstood that they can purchase items directly, as the UI displays card listings similar to an online supermart.
UNINTUITIVE GEO-LOCATION
The app 'set' a home-base address upon first load and did not detect the users' current location as they moved.
"PROMOTIONS ARE A SWEETENER BUT IT IS NOT A BE-ALL AND END-ALL."
IRRELEVANT DEALS
Our disappointed tester will not use the app if she is unable to utilise the promotions for at least half of her grocery basket.
WHAT PAIN POINT WILL WE SOLVE? WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO EARLY ADOPTERS?
RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
I ran a number of research activities concurrently to understand pain points, which subsequently informed how we defined our early adopters.
One of the crucial first-steps we took was to devise user surveys:
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Analysed a 2017 remote market survey with 82 collected responses
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Distributed an interviewee recruitment survey that received 23 responses. We further shortlisted 10 individuals for one-on-one interviews who matched the traits of our proto-persona — the primary household manager who shops at least once a week and has no household help. At this early stage, these were still very vague qualifying criteria so as not to close-off possibilities.
For the in-person interviews, I asked the interviewees lots of questions about their current grocery shopping solutions and their experience with cooking and managing excess food:
Recall back to the last time you went grocery shopping, can you tell me what was the journey like?
What methods/solutions have you tried to help you cook more often?
Can you tell me about a time when meal prepping was frustrating or didn’t work out for you?
(if they say they fail to cook regularly but wished they could)
FINDINGS
We soon realised the situation was far more complex than anticipated. People were not converting because the average Singaporean seldom cooked at home due to cultural, lifestyle and cost factors.
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Almost a quarter of respondents had no frustrations because they preferred takeaway which satisfies their hunger needs just as well.
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20.5% of respondents who tried home-cooking were intimidated by planning and deciding what to eat.
Meal prep perceived as troublesome at every step, with multiple considerations
While majority of interviewees felt there could be more guidance and simplification to the meal prep process, cooking was still not top-of-mind and prioritised as something they must do.
Most households do not care for promotional discounts
Since they eat out more, grocery ingredients do not form a large portion of household expenses.
Within communities of people who enjoyed cooking or were health-conscious, they were happy with the status quo of existing solutions.
What was missing was a painful trigger for seeking alternatives.
SO, WHO ARE OUR EARLY ADOPTERS?
TIGHTENING OUR FOCUS - PERSONAS
I had taken the approach of uncovering pain points interviewees had at each stage of the meal prep process, identifying the problems least addressed and that had the most market potential, and then mapping that to who (demographics) that user was, and what (behaviour) they did for meal prep on a weekly basis.
Identifying innovators and early adopters rather than the whole gamut of potential users/personas helps build a community willing to take a chance on a new, innovative solution for their niche problem.
The strategy is to make one community love and adopt our product, which we hope will progressively cascade to the mass-market.
THEIR LIFE CIRCUMSTANCES TRIGGERS THEM TO SEARCH FOR WAYS TO EASILY MAINTAIN SPECIAL DIETARY REQUIREMENTS
Health Issue Sufferers and Young Mothers need guidance and motivation to cook more regularly because they are in a transitional period of life where they must control they and their families' dietary intake.
Which features should we develop and prioritise?
Our product was shaping up to address too many aspects. On the other hand, narrowing down to only a portion of the process ignores the fact that every step is inter-related.
We mapped the personas' journeys as a team to understand their user stories and then transferred them to a Systemico Model framework (right).
We placed and grouped the user stories and created release plans in accordance with importance. Core features that meet users' baseline expectations get released first.
IDEATION - EXPERIMENTING TO FIND THE BEST WAY
I sketched my first set of wireframes with the vision we were going to sell on Demo-Day in mind. I pitched the concept of a "Spotify for Cooking" to the founder.
I referenced the screenshots that the team compiled from studying and conducting competitive analysis of related meal planning, shopping list and cooking apps on the marketplace.
This was followed by validating the concept with 6 usability tests. Testers had to perform a series of tasks around a meal prep scenario.
Just like Spotify, personalised recipe 'playlists' are recommended to users based on their dietary and taste preferences, as well as 'themes' according to mood, occasions and cuisine types.
The Good
The features we planned - from favouriting recipes, grocery deals, to an online supermart etc - testers felt they all added value.
The Bad
The entire experience felt overwhelming due to the number of features and options presented - it led to a Paradox of Choice.
Poor Execution
The experience was hampered by some user flows that didn't make sense and certain UI elements being hidden.
Because testers had to figure out how things work on top of new feature concepts, it added to the feeling of overwhelm.
New Wireframes
I took the feedback and sketched the 2nd set of wireframes which served as a blueprint for our Demo-Day prototype.
FROM FRAGMENTED PROCESS TO A ONE-STOP SOLUTION
Demo-Day
I decided to focus on the user flow of Gina looking for recipe inspiration and meal prep guidance, leaving out promotional deals.
My UX/UI colleague and I had exactly 12 days to design 22 high fidelity mockups with interactivity.
Our Demo-Day debut was a success. We pitched a validated and winning concept to potential investors, and we showcased a high fidelity interactive prototype to the public at our booth.
VALIDATION AND ITERATION
To further refine our feature set, we conducted usability testings on our Demo-Day prototype with 5 more testers.
Overall, they were delighted by the carousels featuring recipes with big, attractive pictures and felt it was more intuitive this time around.
Content is King
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Some copy was ambiguous and inaccurate. How recipes were written and presented for consumption was extremely important to whether testers would consider using the app regularly.
Kitchen and Ingredients List
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Several testers questioned if there could be recipe recommendations using ingredients from their Kitchen inventory. Although this was already present on Explore, it was not immediately apparent since there was no affordances to discover the link between the two sections.
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The suggested ingredients replacement feature was well received but testers felt that highlighting which ingredients were essential for the recipe or which ones they already had in their Kitchen would have been more useful.
VISION VS PRACTICALITY
Version 1
Unlike our Demo-Day showcase, we had to reduce the features included in the version 1 release to only those we identified as Core.
While the Kitchen, online supermart integration and recipe customisation functionalities were some of the most requested, we couldn't develop them right now without a stable recipe database and platform to build from.
THOUGHTS & TAKEAWAYS
Getting people to change their habits is a challenging and difficult task. I learnt that to do so, not only must the solution be frictionless, all parts of the user's journey, including their motivations, have to be considered in totality.
Thanks to proper user research, we discovered that we didn't address the right market nor did we have a complete picture of users' problems in the first place, allowing Yoripe to pivot to a new value proposition quickly.
It was also my first time juggling between coming up with a grand vision concept for pitching purposes, and scaling it down later for real-world implementation. This presented me with the opportunity to practise my prioritisation skills and balance a huge UX scope with business concerns.