How can we create a great experience for users that helps the business sell more books?
Tools that enable users to find new cookbooks they'll love.
LOTS of positive reviews.
I started by conducting user interviews and a survey, which provided key insights into the needs and frustrations of cookbook enthusiasts—people who regularly cook and use cookbooks at home and take pride in creating meals for themselves or for friends.
After analyzing my research findings, I identified three key insights:
As many as 80% of cookbook owners buy cookbooks to try new recipes or learn new cooking techniques.
Because there are so many cookbooks, 72% of cookbook owners will research cookbooks before they buy them.
Finally, more than half of users struggle to tell which cookbooks will have recipes they’ll like or use, or that are easy to follow or find ingredients for.
Existing solutions to this problem exist in the form of reviews for the cookbooks themselves, but they don't offer much insight into the recipes contained within them.
To address these challenges, I designed the navigation around finding cookbooks in the ways that my survey respondents said they most preferred to find new cookbooks—by cuisine or cooking style, by food type, or by author—paired with options to apply filters to narrow your search.
Next, I designed the product pages to provide users with all the information they needed to make the research process easier, including the book’s price and photos, a detailed description of the book, user-generated reviews, and the option to add the book to a wishlist.
Finally, to address the lack of insight into the recipes themselves, I created “recipe cards,” a novel feature that allows users to see reviews of the recipes in each cookbook, submitted by other community members. This makes it easy to tell if a cookbook has recipes that are highly rated and easy to follow.
My first round of usability testing revealed several areas of improvement. Since I organized cuisines by continent, some users struggled to find cuisines from unfamiliar places. This led me to add alternate pathways to other cuisines from each collection page.
Other users struggled to fully grasp the recipe card feature and weren’t sure how to use it. To address this, I added a tooltip next to the copy adjacent to the recipe cards, to explain the feature better.
A follow-up round of usability testing proved successful—all of my participants could perform all tasks—and many of them expressed genuine interest in the platform. Lots of people said how it was an absolute game changer for cookbook browsing and buying and how they loved the idea of the recipe cards themselves.
