— Project: SERIOUS EATS

ROLE

User Experience
User Research
Content Strategy
Information Architecture
Product Writing

ABOUT

Recipe blog redesign
Completed at Hard Candy Shell in 2014 on a team of 5 (me + a visual designer, the design director, a front end developer, and a project manager)

THE BRIEF

Make recipes easy to find and easy to follow whether you're reading them on a computer at work while you're bored, on your phone for the ingredient list while grocery shopping, or on an ipad while you're cooking.

OVERVIEW

Serious Eats was founded in 2006. By 2014, they had experimented with a plethora of features, design styles, and content directions, none of which were ever phased out. We were tasked with bringing the site together into a cohesive, polished, and useful resource for their loyal food loving audience. Strategic deliverables included a more focused editorial strategy, curating topics to only the highest-quality posts rather than the more-is-more concept previously in practice, as well as creating more modern social spaces for discussion and community - out with the forums, in with the gamut of social media platforms and sharing. Experience design updates addressed the findability of recipes by category, ingredient, or author, adding components to aid cooks as they shop for ingredients and follow along with recipes in appropriate mobile or tablet settings, and of course promoting sharing, speeding things up, and helping all the high-quality food photography shine and look delicious.

— WIREFRAMES & UX EXPLORATIONS

— RESULTS

"A cleaner layout. Bigger photos. Faster page loads. And most exciting of all, improved browsing on your phone and tablet. No more mobile site with limited functionality and no clunky desktop view on your mobile browser. Yup, we've gone responsive."

— THE FINAL PRODUCT