The Great British Bake Off app was released in April 2016 to accompany the show, allowing people to bake recipes they had seen on the show.
Performing an app audit highlighted issues within the app that could explain why users were abandoning it. How might we redesign the experience so it would delight users?
Key problems identified:
• Navigation. The architecture was not user-friendly, resulting in confused users and aimless clicking as there was no clear path for each journey.
• Brand disconnect. The design overall didn’t match the branding on other touch points for the show, resulting in users doubting it’s authenticity.
• Legibility. The recipes were difficult to read, especially at a distance, which is necessary when reading a recipe while baking, and had no supporting visual guidance.
Focusing on the key problem areas, the proposed solutions centre around reducing cognitive load required from the user:
• Visibility of system status. Features such as progress indicators and steppers give an indication on progress.
• Rethinking the navigation. How many destinations do I plan to have? How often will people switch between them?
• Branding and aesthetics. The Bake Off brand focuses on bringing delight and infusing emotion into its bakes. This is something I kept in mind during the redesign, trying to bring personality and simplicity to the interface design.
A significant amount of time was spent on empathizing with the user, understanding their needs and problems experienced when using recipe apps as well as the user flow through the app.
• User control and freedom. The location, visibility and persistence of the bottom bar means users can access the top-level destinations quickly, wherever they are within the app.
• Consistency and Standards. Consistency is maintained by following the Material Design Guidelines and using common patterns so familiarity with using the app can speed up journeys.
• Personalisation. Recipes and articles can be saved for a later time, curating their experience within the app and acting as a reference tool.
• Search, Sort, Filter. Contextual search, sorting options and filters helps users find the relevant results in less time and there’s less demand on the user on selecting what they want and instead, guides them to narrowing their choice.
• Following a recipe with ease. Progress indicators, video reference and text size changer were included to make the process as smooth as possible for users of all ages and maintain legibility at any distance.
As a personal project aiming to become more familiar with Material Design, I did not test the redesign rigourously. A basic prototype had been built and should I have the opportunity to test with external users, I would take the chance to discover areas for improvement in the usability of locating a recipe, discovering recipes and following a recipe within the app.
For this project, I chose to design to Material Design guidelines, designing for Android operating systems, as it was unfamiliar to me compared to iOS.
The main goals were:
• Realigning the brand
• Reorganising and updating the navigation
• Reorganising and updating the content
The core experiences I hoped to convey were:
• That anybody can use it
• It’s fun and engaging to use
• It’s valuable to the user
I felt I really improved my analytical thinking skills during this project, especially in rethinking the navigation and user flows.
There are areas in which I want to further develop and improve upon:
• More data analysis. As I got more confident in conducting user interviews, gathering secondary research and competitor information, the more data I had to analyse. Looking back, the data could have been better organised, utilising methods such as affinity mapping or creating empathy maps for example.
• Conduct usability tests. Writing testing guides and scripts will help me become more confident in testing future prototypes.
There are some concepts I’d like to add if I were to continue working on this project:
• Further personalisation. Features such as ingredient substitutions and serving size adjusters would offer a more individualised experience for the user.
• Community development. Features such as sharing, uploading photos of their bakes, and a comment section would further solidify consistency across channels.
• Other top-level pages such as search and shopping lists.
• Voice integration. Users can navigate through recipes by voice alone and don’t have to worry about touching the screen and handling food at the same time.
