Instacart
Recipes
For my Kleiner Perkins design project (*accepted as a 2023 KP Design Finalist), I was challenged to redesign a feature from Instacart. My goal was to break down the product and improve one feature to maximize revenue outcomes, while increasing user satisfaction.
Role
Product designer
Timeline & Result
36 hours, Jan 2023,
KP Design Fellow Finalist
Skills
User research, Product design, Interaction design
Recipes is a feature where users can buy groups of ingredients based on recommended recipes. It guides users when they don’t know what to buy and helps users plan their week’s meals.
Recipes incentivizes larger basket sizes per order, while making it more convenient for users, a perfect feature to improve for our goals.
I interviewed and observed how 12 active and 4 former users navigated the app and Recipes feature, leading me to 3 major pain points:
Pain Point #1 / Inaccessible While Shopping
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Pain Point #2 / Unoptimized Recommendations
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Pain Point #3 / Confusing Carts
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Feature #1 / New Grocer Navigation
My design direction focused on enhancing accessibility and glanceability as Recipes is only used once or never. This forced me to make trade-offs as I replaced and shifted nav. bar tabs and changed certain actions.
Breakdown
Feature #2 / Mid-Shopping Recipes
Users weren't happy with mid-shopping recommendations that came from irrelevant grocers. Thus, the new Recipes would clearly show that users are shopping from the same store.
Breakdown
Feature #3 / Context-Based Carts
Originally, there was a lack of information showing if an ingredient comes from a recipe, let alone which recipe it came from. So let's add context!
Breakdown
* Display "(0)" if there are no shared items to avoid confusion.
Reflections
This redesign assumes that Recipes could be a powerful feature that leads to higher retention and higher basket purchases. Hence, if given the change to test these changes, I would first test how useful the feature is against said metrics, or whether it's just a "nice to have" feature.
Second, I would find out the average number of categories for a grocer as a horizontal scroll for the Aisles will not be ideal for large numbers. Hence, it may be better to switch it with Ready Meals at the nav. bar.