Enhancing Amazon's recipe UX to inspire basket building.

Whole Foods Market and Amazon Fresh

2021-2022

A 70% drop-off rate from the current Recipes landing page to the detail page underscored the need to improve the user experience and encourage basket-building.

Enhancing Amazon's recipe UX to inspire basket building.

With 5.4 million customers already exploring recipes through their Amazon Alexa devices and high traffic on Whole Foods Market recipe pages, we recognized the need to improve the existing recipe page on Amazon. I led the redesign with Amazon Fresh UX to create an experience that inspires and encourages users to engage more with recipes to build their carts each week.

The Problem

Customer

Building meal plans and carts take 4-5 hours per week.
Meal planning is a struggle as families have diverse tastes and preferences and implies being strictly bound to a daily plan.
Recipes sometimes deter people away because they are seen as rigid and shoppers need swaps and customization options.

Current Experience & Platform

Current experience lacks the storytelling, organization and key decision-making information needed to inspire click-through to recipe detail pages
Recipes are hard to discover because the entry point is not clear and directly connected to purchasing

Opportunities

Surface recipes as a way to inspire customers to try new ingredients, products or brands resulting in increased revenue
Sprinkle recipes throughout the shopping journey, from the storefront to search to smart suggestions in the cart.

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I met with key stakeholders from Product, Engineering and Business to present key findings from user testing so we could align on a differentiated storefront. I showcased the pros and cons of each approach and we collectively aligned on a differentiated storefront. This ensures:

No cart conflict when checking out separately
No confusion between fulfillment promises
Clear and logical ingress and egress points that enables customers to orient themselves
Alignment with customers primary mission to order catering
Browse, search and filtering UX is for the catering menu only

Through a mix of user testing and generative research, we uncovered the distinct needs of the catering customer. The insights compelled us to re-work the project plan and allow more time for up-front discovery work. Now the real work begins...

Flow 2: Meals planned to perfection

Audience: Families, Culinary Enthusiasts

This second concept sets out to provide our avid planners with a tool that makes them super shoppers. When we reduce the time from planning, we can focus on building satisfaction. Shopping for groceries becomes more delightful when focusing on the food you love. These screens focus on the mobile app experience in which we focused on reducing the friction our customers experience as they plan their meals for the week. Building your meal plan translates into building your cart at the same time. Build your own bundle too!

After some rapid and informal research, it became evident that customers in the meal planner group enjoy creating weekly meal plans, even specifying days when they don't require meals. These plans are usually crafted based on the ingredients in their fridge and pantry, inspiration from recipes or favorites, and family preferences.

Flow 3: All of your favorites, automated

Audience: Single professionals, dual-income households

Looking further into the future, can we leverage what we know about our customers to create an intelligent and personalized shopping experience that can do the shopping for you? We want to allow for full customization and control for those who want it, or no work at all. Either way, groceries show up every week. Think automated meal plans or an auto-generated cart.

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Flow 3: All of your favorites, automated

Audience: Single professionals, dual-income households

Basil Design System

Taking on the overhaul of the website necessitated the creation of a new digital design language system. This system is designed to embody and reflect the brand essence, conveying organic, intuitive and welcoming. In technical terms, it needs to be extensible, accessible, and reusable

“The Whole Foods Market website should be Disneyland for food lovers. It should inspire the senses, spark a sense of discovery, encourage people to explore — while conveying a sense of order and ease.”

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Moderated Concept Testing

Remote Moderated Prototype Evaluation with n=21 customers

Key questions:

What features were users gravitating towards?
What brings them the most hesitation?
How did the site make them feel compared to shopping in-store?
Would they be more likely to use this site or stay on Amazon?

Overwhelming positive feedback proved that customers were interested in the following themes when it comes to shopping for groceries online.
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1. Increased Efficiency
2. Inspirational Content and Recommended Items
3. Personalization
4. Brand Recognition

Post Launch

In-store Pickup Location

During store intercepts, customers were not clear where they needed to pick up their order. Store layouts are unique from store to store which makes it difficult to implement a solution across all stores. We worked with Marketing to design clear signage designating where to go after placing the order as well as displaying a map on the confirmation screen.

(OUTCOME and OPPORTUNITIES)

(1-Outcome)

+72% Improved Traffic

We saw a significant increase to recipe detail pages with new design. Customers described it as vibrant and exciting.

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Higher avg baskets

Customers who shopped recipes had larger baskets, 54% of customers add items to their cart from recipe pages.

(2-Opportunities)

Personalization

Opportunity to further expand on preferences that expand beyond the primary shopper in the household. How might we take into account a family's dietary restrictions etc?

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Recipe Sourcing

Can customers shop ingredients from Whole Foods using their own recipes or from other sources. How might a user convert a recipe they see on social to an Amazon cart?

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Retention

More investigation required on how to get customers to act on recipes they have saved.

(3-Project Team)‍

Dream Team

Product Design Leads: Hanisha Patel (WFM) and Catherine Shen (Amazon Fresh)

Product Managers: Nikhil Gola (WFM) and Liz Leonard (Amazon Fresh)

Development: Amazon Eng

*All images are owned by Whole Foods Market.