Condé Nast had not yet entered the ecommerce subscription space and wanted to test an approach by launching a pilot program for an online cooking school.
Their partners in this effort included:
The Culinary Institute of America for their teaching expertise
Cleeng, a third party service which manages subscriptions and integrates with external payment services like Paypal
Citibank, which agreed to sponsor a trial class for interested users in exchange for ad space on the site.
Our objectives for the project included:
Design a simple and elegant site experience that affirms user expectations for the quality and expertise they might expect from the Epicurious brand.
Entice users to sign up for a free class.
Motivate users to subscribe to the school.
My Role: UX Designer
Key Activities: Requirements gathering, stakeholder interviews, wireframing, visual design, usability testing.
Through user data provided by Condé Nast and stakeholder interviews, we gathered a set of requirements that helped guide our solutioning process.
“We want to make sure that our [Epicurious] brand reputation is reflected in the experience.”
“Nearly 64% of our customers rate themselves as advanced cooks.”
“This is a pilot project to help form Condé Nast’s ecommerce subscription strategy.”
“User analytics, budget and pilot nature of the project pointed to a responsive solution.”
“We’ll be using Cleeng [subscriber management platform] for [the video PPV] ecommerce functionality.”
“Users will need to understand what’s included [in the courses], how long they’ll take, and other aspects of buying a subscription.”
Our mobile first, responsive design approach to designing and implementing a solution for the initial release of the site was to target 3 design layouts for launch; laptop, smartphone and tablet portrait & landscape.
Since the majority of the users (75%) will be on a tablet and Smart-phone by day, it was logical to have the landscape width cover both tablets and desktops.
Rapid prototyping was used early to clearly see how regions would respond in the different views of the layout prior to build. The pre-production work ironed out many of the technical and design issues before templates were built, ensuring multi-platform and device success.
Careful consideration was made toward a design that presented an simple and elegant visual design solution that met the expectations of both user and client.
The design is bright and fresh with plenty of white space to make sure the beautiful photos of food and most importantly, the instruction video stood out as the central focus. We utilized the Epicurious brand color palette and paired the Epi green with shades of orange to help critical calls to action stand out.
The school visual style guide consisted of styles for type, color, photography, form elements and navigation elements for laptop, tablet and mobile.
Condé Nast put out a promotional video introducing the school. Although the PPV subscription model did not prove successful, the pilot was successful in helping Condé Nast learn and capture valuable data about it’s users.
