Surya Vaidyanathan

Surya

Surya Vaidyanathan

Project

Improving the brand experience and customer journey following a rebrand

Improving the brand experience and customer journey following a rebrand

Improving the brand experience and customer journey following a rebrand

Workflow

UX Research

Synthesis

UI/UX Design

Usability Testing

My Role

UX Researcher

UI/UX Designer

Copywriter

Team

Ragoth Bala, Cofounder

Harish Visweswaran, Cofounder

Saif al Falah, Engineer

Ryan Sievert, Lead Designer

Brentos Fernandez, Creative Lead

Timeline

6 months

Launched in Aug 2023

Context

The Cumin Club is a D2C food subscription company that provides authentic, affordable Indian meal kits that can be prepared in just five minutes. They are based in Chicago, IL and operate in the continental US and India.


They had been operating on word-of-mouth with steady growth for 3 years and got seed funding from VCs in 2021. With the objective of scaling the business, they completed a rebrand and wanted to redesign their website.

Problem Space

The business goals were:


  • to provide consistent branding and messaging between platforms with the intent to delight, comfort, and educate


  • to expand the customer base to people less familiar with Indian food


  • Improve conversion rate by 1%.

How might we make the brand consistent and accessible to people who may not understand the product?

Solution

A visually-appealing customer journey


  • Redesigned a functional website into a platform to support conversion flows for multiple kinds of customers


  • Created a branded design system


  • Feedback and data-based iterations through MVP launch and post-launch

Research

  1. Competitive Analysis

I studied 6 other D2C food subscription businesses, analyzing their websites using heuristic principles to identify key strengths and weaknesses. I also went through reviews on discussion boards and online forums to understand the customer experience in interacting with the brand.


There were several takeaways from this, but the most important one was this:


It should always be easy to skip a delivery or cancel a subscription, and follow up procedures should be measured.

  1. Interviews

This insight became a major point during the user interviews as well. I interviewed 7 members of our current and projected user base and asked them about their relationships with food and their thoughts and experiences around interactions with product subscriptions. Key quotes and observations were synthesized using empathy maps. This, along with quantitative data from surveys, brought out the users’ main pain points, from which came the design requirements.

  1. Personas

From these insights came our main design requirements and user personas.

Design Requirements

  • Users want to know that their food is healthy and this means different things to different people.


  • Is should always be easy to skip, cancel, or pause a subscription.


  • They like the ability to choose from a menu, but this choice can be intimidating to some and too much work to others.

Additional Insights

  • Users want to be able to modify not only their meal plan, but their meals as well to suit their needs and tastes.


  • They are wary to invest in a subscription that they are not sure will fit their needs.

These additional insights applied more to product development than the UI/UX design. At the time, we decided not to pursue any of these due to time and resource constraints, but were filed as information to be used down the line for product decisions being taken at the executive level.

Design

We kept to a simple user flow with value statements and visual explanations strategically placed so that a user can land on any step of the subscription flow via marketing channels and gain a complete understanding of the brand and product offerings.


At this point in the project, I was in charge of the functional aspects of the website, i.e. the conversion flow, while the branding and visual design were provided by senior creatives from the investor’s team. I worked within their branding guidelines to create the first high-fidelity prototype.

Low-Fidelity Menu Page

Mid-Fidelity Menu Page

Hi-Fidelity Menu Page

Final Menu Page

User Testing

We tested an early high-fidelity prototype with a group of users that included both existing customers and prospective ones. The feedback was generally positive, with some minor functional points of confusion, but the most frequent piece of feedback was that the homepage was underwhelming. It was lacking that big "wow factor" that was necessary to hook users into entering the conversion flow.


Using this feedback and other comments from test users, I got buy-in from the founders on some short-term changes, which I proposed to the creative team. We collaborated on the creation of an ambient video background to use in the hero section.


This was well-received by test users, but then, I took it a step further and proposed a redesign of the homepage itself, taking into account the user feedback along with certain aspects of the design that had been posing development challenges. This design was well-received both by test users and our internal team, and the creative team felt that I had enough understanding of the brand design to take over from there. This design was pushed into development for the MVP release.

We tested an early high-fidelity prototype with a group of users that included both existing customers and prospective ones. The feedback was generally positive, with some minor functional points of confusion, but the most frequent piece of feedback was that the homepage was underwhelming. It was lacking that big "wow factor" that was necessary to hook users into entering the conversion flow.


Using this feedback and other comments from test users, I got buy-in from the founders on some short-term changes, which I proposed to the creative team. We collaborated on the creation of an ambient video background to use in the hero section.

This was well-received by test users, but then, I took it a step further and proposed a redesign of the homepage itself, taking into account the user feedback along with certain aspects of the design that had been posing development challenges. This design was well-received both by test users and our internal team, and the creative team felt that I had enough understanding of the brand design to take over from there. This design was pushed into development for the MVP release.

Launch & Aftermath

We soft launched an MVP in August of 2021. Reviews were generally positive and we spent several weeks after ironing out bugs and tweaking features and layout based on data from Mouseflow, Hotjar, Google Analytics, and user feedback.


Post-launch, I continued to support the team with the website design, adding new features like the introduction of a blog and a new product line called The Cumin Pantry, as well as a new cart experience after their included sides were turned into add-ons.

Learnings

Designing with an MVP in mind is essential to facilitating the product development process

While we would ideally like to push a highly polished version of the design into production, it is most often the case that time and resources dictate the need to release and MVP, followed by iterations to continuously improve the product. Keeping this in mind allows us to consistently make data-based decisions.

Advocate for qualitative research data while considering stakeholder needs

Due to the changes in my role as a designer throughout this process, I did not always advocate for the insights I gained from my qualitative research. Given the chance to do this again, I would be more proactive about doing this, and test more often to challenge those insights.

Prioritize design documentation and handoff

Given the chance to do this again, I would work more closely with the development team in the handoff stages to ensure that they were well-equipped to create the design. I would touch base with them more often in the aftermath as well to ensure ease of development.

Let's create things together!

Let's create things together!

© Surya Vaidyanathan 2024. All rights reserved. Made with filter coffee and 💛.

© Surya Vaidyanathan 2024. All rights reserved.

Made with filter coffee and 💛.