Igluu
A close look at how we tried to minimize the daily stress surrounding deciding what to eat.
80% of people want to eat at home.
But 66% of those people say that cooking is their main source of stress.
"Many more evenings than I’d like to admit, I find myself standing in front of the refrigerator, contemplating what can be concocted from a bottle of mustard, half a tomato and a cut of mystery meat I’d forgotten was in there, making me question its viability as a meal option. The dinner dilemma is inevitable."
How you faced this problem?
In a distributed and small — but very committed and talented team — we were constantly (weekly sprints) testing our assumptions and pushing our product forward trying to figure out the best way to make people's life fun & easier in the kitchen.
I lead the design, the UX and the front-end of the product, working closer with an amazing development team, in a dynamic and complex Ruby on Rails environment using lean and agile methodologies.
I was in charge of the design and code of all UI prototypes, wireframes and final designs, such as A/B testing experiments and branding and content management.
Awesome! And what did you create?
Ta-da! Igluu is a website designed around the idea of solving the problem of meal time and minimizing the daily stress surrounding deciding what to eat at home.
The platform helps users to build meal plans, over time learning behaviours and suggesting ideas. It also sets up shopping lists based on the recipes chosen, which can be printed or purchased online at selected grocery stores.
On the backend, Igluu has a dashboard for chefs to upload and organize recipes and interact.
Igluu offers answers to one dogging question: What’s for Dinner?
User Workflow — Making it simple
We divided the user workflow in 03 simple steps and tried to make it as simple and user-friendly as we could. As we already heard before: It’s simple until you make it complicated.
Recipe's card concept
In order to stimulate and increase the number of recipe’s views and interactions, we introduced the concept of recipe cards.
It allowed us to feature and focus the user attention to the recipe’s photo (keeping it 100% interactive) and at the same time containing more secondary information of the recipe in the back of the card.
Now watch this beauty in action
A screencast showing the entire conversion funnel and main features of the platform.
Revenue Model
Igluu's revenue model is based on the freemium principal – those using the platform free of charge have access to a number of Igluu’s features, but they will soon be offered the possibility of paid extras, such as chef subscriptions, video content with step-by-step instructions, nutritional information and preferred brands. The company also receives commissions stemming from supermarket sales, advertising, sponsored recipes and market information.
+3k exclusive recipes
Results
We created a really supportive community of more than +30k food lovers, who ordered more than 3k menus from over +200 chefs, in a period of 7 months of project.
I think that, even struggling to find the best and most appealing value proposition, we, as a team, did a really good job with the brand and product development.
In the end of 2012 I left the team to focus 100% in the development of my own business and company. But that's story for another post…
♥
Igluu team, oct/2012 @ Rio de Janeiro
Read more below about my next journey at Monograme
I’m a brazilian Designer & Entrepreneur specialized in Digital Projects, currently living and working in Amsterdam as a UX Designer at Booking.com.
If you want to know more about me, feel free to stalk my Linkedin profile or drop me an email at renatocesarcp@gmail.com
