UX Design • WEB design • EXPERIMENTATION • a/B testing • Concept design • holistic experience • product FIT • personalisatioN • Mealkit
date. Dec '22 (Ongoing)
scope. Focusing on prospective user journey with potential personalisation efforts for the holistic user journey
team. Main responsible designer as part of Growth domain at HelloFresh. Working closely with product partners, UX writer and engineers
outcome. An evolving prospect user experience that reassures on how HelloFresh can fit user’s needs in an interactive way, while also laying the ground for personalisation efforts for the holistic experience.
Problem Area
HelloFresh provides its customers weekly meal-kit boxes that come with measured ingredients and recipes according to their choices.
We regularly conduct surveys to capture prospective users’ top questions during our conversion funnel experience. doubts about our menu and whether our product meets their dietary and lifestyle needs.
These user doubts manifest themselves as a lack of confidence in our menu and ultimately product fit.
Previous attempts to address this issue were hampered by internal hesitations about allowing users to select their meals before converting, due to concerns about potential drops in conversion rates.
As we took a deeper look into insights, we were able to detect this was not about full control of the user’s first-week menu, but rather about building confidence on not only dietary but also lifestyle match of the entire product. Since we kept encountering similar questions from users in more recent studies, we made another attempt at collaboratively addressing this problem area.
Collective ideation
We have conducted several brainstorming sessions focused on “How might we help users build confidence around our menu and/or product?”. Our underlying principle was to avoid friction in the experience while helping to build this confidence, as our target audience includes potential customers with varying levels of dietary and lifestyle needs.
These sessions included participants from different disciplines and domains intentionally to break the loop of conversation around the long-existed problem area. The sessions were highly interactive and produced a wide range of solutions. However, a common theme from the participants was the idea of shifting the control and reassurance to the users themselves by asking them the right questions.
Bias for action
We’re a fast-paced team that values experimentation to gain new insights. We use testing to support our decision-making process, whether it's validating user research findings, confirming design directions, exploring ideas for future strategies, or assessing interest in new business initiatives.
Once we had a convergence of solution ideas from the ideation session, we decided to take a step to test the waters. The initial A/B tests we conducted boosted our confidence in the concept and resulted with positive business impact
Invitation to think of the holistic user experience
The positive business impact sparked the tendency to double down on our product partners.
However, as designers, we believed that we could achieve more than simply making minor changes to improve the conversion rate. This concept holds great potential because we collect user input early in their journey. This approach not only allows us to experiment within our domain and enhance the user experience, but it also marks the beginning of personalization within the holistic user experience.
We understood the importance of involving and gaining support from our product partners for our vision. One approach to kick-start this process was to create preliminary drafts that communicate our vision and encourage discussion, basically sharing the mess and inviting their input. We organised sessions, where we brought ideas focused on the funnel experience and beyond.
Our product partners also shared their thoughts. These sessions helped us shape those thoughts collectively, and we agreed to reach out to relevant teams for the elevation of the holistic experience.
Bump on the road? Pivot, but keep the vision
After meeting with other teams, we uncovered that some share our vision, but our yearly plans don't match up. This meant other teams won’t be able to support building out the holistic vision yet.
After making sure that other teams cannot act on the initiative now, we made the decision to pivot. This meant shifting our mindset to staying true to the vision while prioritizing continuous learning. We focused on building a stronger insights base towards that vision via focusing on plan selection experience for prospective customers, that can help elevating holistic user experience both now and in the future.
After all, growth domain is the perfect space to lay the groundwork for segmentation and personalisation . We focused on exploring what matters at the start of the user journey via experimentation and user research, what type of data points we could collect earlier in the user journey that would be relevant for the rest of the experience, which can then influence future work in other domains.
Solution
We’ve expanded the plan selection experience for potential users to address their needs and expectations around dietary and lifestyle preferences, via asking questions, to increase their confidence in the product.
Dietary fit was repetitively one of main concerns in user research, yet dumping too much information on the bigger audience did not yield positive results. Therefore, we focused on not only introducing specific dietary options in our questions, but also paid attention to keeping information architecture meaningful to allow easier correlation for users; such as leaving them as optional.
For lifestyle fit, we moved away from passive value preposition communication, that was scattered around the user journey, to an interactive approach that lets users communicate what they’re looking to achieve with our product.
We made continuous improvements to our information architecture, content, visual identity, and user flow through experimentation. This involved conducting A/B tests with different variations for each change, occasionally supplemented by in-depth user studies to comprehend the reasons behind the success or failure of certain aspects for users.
Making the insights available — Adoption
As we continued to experiment and make an impact on both user experience and business metrics, we noticed an increase in interest from within the company. Various teams began reaching out to us to utilize the user input. We have been striving to make the user input available for personalization efforts beyond our team. With teams reaching out to us, we were able to build a strong case for it.
As HelloFresh Group holds multiple brands under its umbrella, several brands have adapted the concept to their context and started their own experimentation, elevating their prospective user experience.
We consistently shared our insights and progress with teams responsible for different parts of the user journey. As we approached next year's planning, we were able to involve additional stakeholders in further investing in personalization efforts.
As of 2024, we had integrated our efforts with several teams to develop a framework for collecting and utilizing user information to personalize the user's experience, not only for prospective customers but also for active subscribers and former users. Meanwhile, we continue to experiment with different aspects of the prospective user experience.