Project
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
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.
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.
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.
User Testing
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.