Influencer Cooking Blog
Moribyan Kitchen
Moribyan
Food That Is
A cooking blog for fans of food and Moribyan, a well-known cooking influencer, to connect and experience life through the joy of food!
Project Duration
Roughly 5 weeks
Project Scope & Methods
Surveys, Interviews, Affinity Mapping, Personas, Wireframing, user journeys, user flows, Usability Testing, prototyping, m0ckup & UI design & web development
My Responsibilities
UX Design, UI design, Web development
Result/Status
Successful, with website gaining about 600k visits/mo
Background Context
Moribyan is a very well-known cooking influencer with a few million followers across Instagram, TikTok, and other social media platforms.
She is also my sister, a girl who started very small, selling baked goods at her local mosque and then sharing recipes with fans. During the pandemic, her vlogs on social media went absolutely viral, and she quickly gained a huge following.
The natural course of action was to design her a responsive web app for her followers, fans, and collaborators to connect with her!
Step 1 Discovery & Research
Brainstorming
User Empathy
The very first step is to ask the following 3 fundamental questions. The questions and answers serve as a mere hypothesis to stage the right questions and research, not to directly inform design decisions. It is, after all, all about the user!
Interviews
Asking the Right Questions
On your left, you’ll see the interview questions I asked several potential users to get a better understanding of their goals, needs, motivations, feelings, behaviors, & opportunities while defining the problem at hand. Notes were taken on empathy maps like the one below.
Interviews
Empathy Maps
On your right, you’ll see the interview answers taken on empathy maps.
This includes several users like a stay-at-home mom looking to please her family, a busy teacher with refined taste that needs to start cooking at home, and a food enthusiast who doesn’t cook at all, but loves and appreciates the process of good food.
Step 2 Analyze & Define
Key Insight
Problem Statement
Cooking can be a real challenge, and nothing feels quite like the sadness of seeing a dinner you worked so hard on go to waste after disappointing everyone who had it. Some people feel lost & need guidance to make great food, some just need a bit of inspiration to spark new ideas, some have a family to please, bored of having the same thing all the time, and some people have limiting health concerns & dietary restrictions and need to spice up & add excitement to their life. Some people are aspiring chefs themselves, others just enjoy watching the process of making amazing food, and some people simply want to follow life role models of people they can love.
Key Insight
Potential Solutions
Reasearch
Competitor Analysis
User Analysis
Personas
Here are the persona types of players I will initially focus on, for the first phase of agile development for the app. Many users of these personas feel underrepresented in other guides and coaching apps for either their skill level, knowledge level or preferences with regards to complexity.
Top Frustration Tags:
Phase -------->
Tasks->
Detailed actions our user is likely to perform
Mindsets->
What our user might be thinking and feeling at the moment
Pain Points->
Detailed actions the user is likely to perform. Frictions and pains encountered by users at each phase
Opportunities->
What you can propose with your product or service to solve the user needs and pains
User Analysis
User Journey Mapping
I mapped out a grid of user’s complete behaviors on their way to find guidance and support while playing League of Legends, including Tasks, Mindsets, Pain Points, & Opportunities during several phases including Awareness, Consideration, Onboarding, Engagement, Improvement, & Advocacy.
Project Goals
Project Briefing
Success Criteria
Step 3 Ideate
Information Architecture
User Flow
Low Fidelity Designs
Wireframes
Here are some of the earliest design ideations I came up with, some low-fidelity wireframes and light markup.
The designs themselves are not set in stone, but they provide good staging ground to outline page requirements for the UI design phase.
Step 4 Prototype & Design
High Fidelity Designs
Prototypes
This is the step I am currently working on! Normally in UX, the next step would have been to do a more low to mid fidelity digital prototype, but since I am personally building the UI myself, I decided to go for a high fidelity mockup.
Please keep in mind, many of the pages are still being designed as you’re reading this 🙂
Be sure to check back for updates!
Step 5 Test & Iterate
Current Status
Iteration in Progress
Currently the site is working and is very successful, getting about 600k visits per month, several sponsors, very positive user metrics such as time spent google rankings and conversion rates, positive user feedback & engagement, and a upward growth in all these success criteria.
The site is not perfect however in usability testing. Occasionally there will be bugs and glitches in certain widgets, such as short codes showing in place of the actual widgets. Some content occasionally loads from http protocol instead of https, which may cause some content to be blocked or appear malformed.
In addition, with the amount of recipes having grown so much, and previous budget & other constraints out of the way, the site has somewhat outgrown itself. We also want to feature larger media and clearer CTAs & other user paths. We also want to add multi-lingual capability to include more users.
The site is currently going through a redesign that will fix these problems. See below for some examples.
Summary
Retrospect
Truth be told, the website was originally designed with a relatively small audience in mind with a relatively small index of content (recipes, guides, posts etc. That has vastly changed since inception. There are now million of potential users demanding a plethora of different recipes as well as other content types like travel, healthy, beauty, lifestyle etc.
The new website will feature branding and content centered more around Hajar (Moribyan) as a wholistic personality/influencer rather than just a source for cooking information, though that will still be the primary type of content.
You can visit Moribyan.com to see the live website right now! You can also check back here to see when I have updates about the redesign in progress 🙂
Get In Touch
If You Enjoyed Learning About Me or Want to Know More, Let's Chat 🙂
