0-1 product development
App
The new staple in your kitchen
A new app to unlock our +30,000 recipe archive and help our readers grow their confidence in the kitchen and connect through food.
→ GOAL
Feast app is the result of an accelerated innovation process to generate new revenue streams at the Guardian.
As many other media organisations, the Guardian’s benefits from sources like advertising have declined over the last few years. It’s important for the newspaper to find new long-term, and sustainable alternative revenue streams.
As part of this strategy, the Basecamp team was created in April 2023.
The vision was to behave as a start-up team from within the organisation. As a team, our two main goals were:
Develop a 12-week repeatable process for innovation.
Launch a new reader-centred product or service within the food & drink space in the course of 23/24
→ Timeline
07/2023 Project started
11/2023 — Internal iOS beta deployed
02/2024 — External iOS beta deployed
03/24 — External iOS soft-launch
05/24 — internal Android beta launch
→ My role
Q2+Q3 23/24
UX design, visual design and design system.
Q4 23/24 + Q1 24/25
Visual design and design system
Cook mode enables readers to easily follow each recipe step by step, prevents their screen from locking and provides easy access to ingredients and notes.
→ MAIN CHALLENGES
1 UNSTRUCTURED CONTENT
We couldn’t tell the difference between ingredients vs. cooking steps vs. servings in our archived recipes.
→ The collaboration between Basecamp engineers, the Content Pipeline team, Data & Insight models, and the food editors has allowed us to structure our old recipes and define a process to structure new content in a way that works for the newsroom and the app.
3 TIMELINE AND SCOPE CREEP
We know we had 6 months to launch a beta of whatever product we built. But there are so many ideas and opportunities in the food space that we could build.
→ We have had to be ruthless at prioritising work and creating a clear roadmap to share with stakeholders and sponsors.
→ We decided to focus on iOS mobile devices to begin with and stagger the development of other device sizes and operating systems.
2 INTEGRATING TECH
We had to build a new product but integrate it with existing tech infrastructure within the organisation for flows like sign in, for example.
→ By doing tech spikes we have pivoted between different potential approaches and decided on a native app approach.
4 RESOURCES
We had a lean approach to the project but it has taken many people across departments and offices to get an app to market.
→ From a design perspective, we started working with a design system, collaborated closely with engineers and created multiple prototypes to communicate proposals and ideas to stakeholders and colleagues from the beginning of the project.
Other challenges included having to design light and dark mode from the get-go as Apple provides both options to users by default.
→ PROCESS
Over the last 12 months, the team has worked on 2-week sprints with an agile approach. We have pivoted multiple times in order to react to research, deadlines, stakeholder needs and resources.
→ Q1 2023/24
(APRIL-JUNE)
DISCOVERY AND RESEARCH WORK
ACCELERATOR WORKSHOP (WHOLE ORGANISATION)
HACK DAY (P&E DEPARTMENT)
→ CORE TEAM
→ Q1 2023/24
(APRIL-JUNE)
→ 1 LEAD RESEARCHER & STRATEGIST
→ 1 BUSINESS LEAD
→ 1 INNOVATION LEAD
→ HEAD OF PRODUCT DESIGN
→ Q2 2023/24
(JULY-SEPT)
FULL BASECAMP TEAM STARTS
MODERATED TESTING
TEAM’S VISIT TO THE GUARDIAN’S ARCHIVE
EXPERIMENTS — VALUE PROP FAKE ADS
WEB-FIRST APPROACH — UX AND DESIGN WORK
→ Q3 2023/24
(OCT-DEC)
REFINEMENT OF (WEB) LEARNING PLATFORM
PIVOT TO APP-FIRST APPROACH — UX AND DESIGN WORK
DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF IOS NATIVE APP
IOS INTERNAL BETA LAUNCH
→ Q4 2023/24
(JAN-MAR)
DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF IOS NATIVE APP
IOS EXTERNAL BETA LAUNCH
IOS SOFT LAUNCH
DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF ANDROID APP
The core team has taken different shapes over time. We have had to change our ways of working and collaborating as colleagues have joined and left the team.
→ Q2 2023/24
(JULY-SEPT)
→ 1 LEAD RESEARCHER & STRATEGIST
→ 1 BUSINESS LEAD
→ 1 INNOVATION LEAD
→ HEAD OF PRODUCT DESIGN
→ 1 SR. PRODUCT MANAGER
→ 1 SR. PRODUCT DESIGNER
→ 2 FULL-STACK SOFTWARE ENGINEERS
→ Q3 2023/24
(OCT-DEC)
→ 1 LEAD RESEARCHER & STRATEGIST
→ 1 BUSINESS LEAD
→ 1 INNOVATION LEAD
→ HEAD OF PRODUCT DESIGN
→ 1 SR. PRODUCT MANAGER
→ 1 SR. PRODUCT DESIGNER
→ 2 FULL-STACK SOFTWARE ENGINEERS
→ 1 PRINCIPAL IOS SOFTWARE ENGINEER
→ 1 SR RESEARCHER
→ 1 SR VISUAL DESIGNER
→ Q4 2023/24
(JAN-MAR)
→ 1 LEAD RESEARCHER & STRATEGIST
→ 1 BUSINESS LEAD
→ 1 INNOVATION LEAD
→ HEAD OF PRODUCT DESIGN
→ 1 SR. PRODUCT MANAGER
→ 1 SR. PRODUCT DESIGNER
→ 2 FULL-STACK SOFTWARE ENGINEERS
→ 1 PRINCIPAL IOS SOFTWARE ENGINEER
→ IOS SENIOR SOFTWARE
ENGINEER
→ 1 SR RESEARCHER
→ 1 SR VISUAL DESIGNER
→ 1 UX DESIGNER
→ 2 ANDROID SOFTWARE ENGINEERS
→ ENGINEER MANAGER
→ SR AGILE LEAD
→ Q1 2024/25
(JAN-MAR)
CONTINUED DEVELOPMENT OF NEW FEATURES AND FEEDBACK REVIEW
ANDROID EXTERNAL BETA LAUNCH
→ Q4 2023/24
(JAN-MAR)
→ 1 LEAD RESEARCHER & STRATEGIST
→ 1 BUSINESS LEAD
→ 1 INNOVATION LEAD
→ HEAD OF PRODUCT DESIGN
→ 1 SR. PRODUCT MANAGER
→ 1 SR. PRODUCT DESIGNER
→ 2 FULL-STACK SOFTWARE ENGINEERS
→ 1 PRINCIPAL IOS SOFTWARE ENGINEER
→ IOS SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER +1
→ 1 SR RESEARCHER
→ 1 SR VISUAL DESIGNER
→ 1 UX DESIGNER
→ 2 ANDROID SOFTWARE ENGINEERS +1
→ ENGINEER MANAGER
→ SR AGILE LEAD
→ USER RESEARCH, INSIGHTS AND MINDSETS
Artefacts like the mindsets mapping developed by the UX research team have helped us define the UX design and flows of the app.
Before defining any solutions, the team focused on:
researching the users’ needs and wants around food & drink content across our main three markets (UK, US and AUS),
their relationship with the Guardian,
and how can we can stand out against a saturated market with competitors beyond NYT Cooking and BBC Good food. Social media and apps like Mob and Cherrypick are also big names in the market.
We correlated the insights and findings with our business needs, market opportunities and developed a product strategy.
Three big items on our list of findings included that:
People that know about the Guardian trust our content and the chefs that publish recipes in the newspaper (even if our list of ingredients err on the long side some times).
People are interested in sustainability.
Readers want a companion experience that guides them in the kitchen and helps them develop their cooking skills.
By gathering the user insights in a mindsets artefact (instead of user personas), we are also able to focus on how a single person might use the app depending on the time and circumstances.
→ UX FLOW AND PRODUCT FEATURES
(Based on the research insights and mindset framework).
Tuesday, 5.15pm
Amira’s partner is taking care of school pick up and bath time, but she will be making dinner.
She’s in the bus, heading back home from the office. She knows she has courgettes in the fridge that she needs to use before they expire but she doesn’t know what to cook as her kids are picky eaters.
She turns to Feast app and searches for recipes with courgettes for inspiration [Explore mindset]. She finds a recipe by Felicity Cloake that her kids will love.
Amira is a young mum of two from the north of England who loves to swim and watch Googlebox and the Great British Bake Off with her partner.
She works in HR at a law firm in a the city and commutes twice a week to the office. She likes cooking but is not the most confident cook with new recipes.
Tuesday, 6pm
Once she gets home, she uses the cook mode feature [companion mindset] to follow the recipe step-by-step as she has never cooked that recipe before.
This prevents her screen from locking (helpful when she’s half-way through chopping an onion!) and lets her read the steps easily from a distance while she cooks.
Initial wireframes for the search screen.
Cards are stacked in a vertical scroll and can be sorted and filtered by the user.
There are also suggested filters.
Users can see what recipes they have saved and previously cooked in the recipe cards.
Initial wireframes for cook mode.
The text is larger so it’s easier to read the current step whilst multitasking and reading from a distance.
friday morning
When Friday morning comes around, she starts planning [immersion mindset] what she’s going to make for her partner’s birthday party over the weekend.
She needs to make a couple of starters, two mains, a cake and have some vegan dessert options.
She saves the recipes she will use so she can easily find them later on.
Initial wireframes for the saved tab.
Readers can easily find all content they have saved previously.
Monday 8am
The birthday party was a success and there were barely any leftovers.
Monday’s are tough because she’s not a morning person. She tries not to be on the phone in front of her kids, but she always ends up scrolling mindlessly [killing time mindset] while waiting for the bus in the mornings.
Initial wireframes for the homepage.
There’s a combination of the latest published content, collections and recipes curated by the food desk and a way to find content from each chef.