Discovery and Research

StreamChef is a company that creates live cooking videos and recipes for customers to follow along in their home. They have an in-house chef that hosts the videos and came to our class asking us to look at their company and create a product around their main concept. As someone who cooks and has purchased cooking box subscriptions, I had prior knowledge going in but had never watched a live cooking class.

We had three weeks to complete the research and come up with a product for StreamChef that would help compliment and advance their vision. My team came together and first sent out a survey about cooking and food to 91 individuals. After completing the initial survey, we created an affinity map to develop correlations in our initial research to figure out what questions we should be asking and which people from our initial survey we should contact again.

We then created a more thorough user interview and contacted 16 of the individuals that took the user survey to get more complete information on their interest in cooking, shopping habits, dietary restrictions and time spent in the kitchen and grocery store.

Our interview questions pertaining to local products and community were very supportive and users were interested in buying into this idea. We executed some ethnographic research by visiting a nearby market Union Kitchen Grocery, which sells products made by local companies and spoke to customers. Many of the customers were shopping in the store because they knew the owner of the products they were purchasing. We decided that there was a value in local. People enjoy supporting local business and feel more involved with their community when they shop local or know the person of the product they are purchasing.

We found our research focusing on local and community and decided to develop a product around local restaurants, products and chefs in DC. We wanted people to be able to explore their city by behind the scenes tours of bars and restaurants, meeting owners of local business and products. We created three personas based around these ideas: Billie ‘the Hipster’, Vivian the ‘Office Worker’ and Phil ‘the Googler’.

We discussed the idea with our instructor and he pushed us to find the actual product in our idea. If we were to lose the support of all the businesses and people we needed to make this idea happen, where would we be left, and would we have a product? Unfortunately, the answer was no, so we decided to pivot to other ideas that we had gathered in our research. That was customers’ love of competition and their desire to save money, time and reduce waste in the kitchen.

Once we had an idea of competition, we had to conceptualize a way to make that a product and to also have it compliment the idea of Stream Chef’s live videos. We came up with a main competition idea of using the leftovers from previous live videos and completing a “leftovers challenge” which a person would be able to show his creativity by using those ingredients and anything left in their kitchen to create and new meal. This would also help people save money and time by using products they already had on hand and reduce waste by using their groceries instead of letting them spoil in the refrigerator.

Once we had our idea, we were tasked to create a website that would showcase the videos and bring our competitions into the fold while being a user-friendly experience.

We researched companies with similar features such as YouTube for their videos and Blue Apron and Craftsy for their cooking components and used them for inspiration to make sure while putting together our website to ensure that we had conventions of mainstream websites. We made a video page very similar to YouTube but moved the messaging to the side of the video so people could communicate and read messages as the videos were playing. We made our homepage similar to Craftsy with lots of images to excite people about cooking. During our usability tests, we focused on user ease of getting to each of the main pages and also on added features. We made a few changes of the site including removing the live light on the main page to indicate that a video was streaming and having utensils over the main pages as you hovered over them.

Our final mock-up of the homepage was a clean layout with green as a main color to convey fresh. We placed a hero image of an aerial view of a kitchen counter to give users a clear indication that this was a cooking website. We put our users score board on the homepage to show that there was a sense of community on our site and they could be featured if they participated in competitions. We added our values of Learn, Compete, Save and Enjoy to our homepage to drive home the fact that these were important ideals of our site. Lastly, we put a Call to Action to subscribe at the bottom to catch any potential customers.

In the future, I would recommend the client consider having videos for a limited timeframe, and not only rely on live videos. We live in a world with DVR and unlimited options, so it is hard to anticipate users being available at a given time. I also recommend circling back to our local ideas once the company has enough users to be credible to other businesses.

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