Cooking With Instagram
SUMMARY
An integrated experience for culinary creators and their followers to connect and interact on a deeper level over recipe sharing.
MY ROLE
User Research, UX and UI Design, Prototyping
Skip ahead to the good stuff
Disclaimer: I do not work at Instagram, and this
project is not affiliated with Instagram. All views
are strictly my own.
Instagram currently does not have an in-app experience that supports culinary creators as they build their brand through recipe sharing. As a baker who utilizes the Instagram app for recipe discovery, I knew there was an untapped opportunity to increase engagement within the culinary community.
A feature built into Instagram that allows culinary creators to easily share their recipes as a whole and gives followers an opportunity to discover, shop ingredients, and cook recipes without exiting the app.
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I interviewed 6 people for this study, 3 creators and 3 followers as well as auditing popular food and recipe apps. The qualitative data I gathered helped me understand how culinary creators and followers currently use the app to communicate and where they experience friction when it comes to recipe sharing and supporting each other.
Culinary Creator
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Difficulty engaging
with the audience
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Typical pain points on Instagram include:
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Constantly redirecting follower's to their website
for a recipe by adding links to their stories
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Manually typing ingredients and cooking steps
in the captions of their posts
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Reminding people that the link to their website is
available in their bio
Follower
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Frustration Replicating
Real Life Cooking Behaviors
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When people discover or are given a recipe, common behaviors include:
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Reviewing the ingredients and listing items that need to be purchased.
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Reading through the instructions to understand the step and equipment needed to complete the recipe
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Cooking along with the recipe steps until completed
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Saving the recipes for later in a drawer
How creators currently share
The Ideal Culinary Community Experience
User Flows
Defining the MVP
Culinary Creators:
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Make the full recipe and ingredient list accessible
within the app
Followers:
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Shop ingredients directly from the app
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Cook alongside the recipe without leaving the app
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Save recipes into a specified collection for later
Tagging Recipes in Posts
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When introducing new recipes, creators relied on stories and lives which disappear if not saved in highlights.
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By using posts, creators can prolong the presence of recipes, the original way people communicated on Instagram.
Currently posts support shopping and donation related tasks through tags.
Tackling Posts
What if these tags also created an entry point to a recipe page?
Instagram is limited in the amount of text in the captions (2,200 characters) and recipes contain a lot of information.
Current Experience:
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Links in bio redirect followers out of the app
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Captions lack scannability and accessibility
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Excess information must be continued in comments
Current Recipe
Post Experience
Design
Tagging Recipes
In Posts
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A new feature in posts for culinary creators to parse a recipe from their website and to integrate the ingredients and cooking steps into a fluid in-app experience.
Experience Flow
Design
The Recipe Detail Page
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All Recipe tags redirect followers to the Recipe Detail Page that offers all relevant information to the recipe and is the entry point to the Cooking with Instagram experience.
Interacting with ​
Linked Posts
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This new experience for followers is split into two modes.
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1. Shop Ingredient Mode
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2. Start Cooking Mode
1.
An Easy Way to
Shop Ingredients
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The Ingredient List is an interactive shopping cart that is also partnered with grocery providers.
Experience Flow
2.
Cooking Mode
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With all the ingredients on hand, the follower
can now cook along with the recipe in the app.
Experience Flow
How Would I Measure Success?
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If this integrated feature were to ship, I would look to measure these metrics:
Adoption Rate
The number of linked posts
made by creators
Increased Engagement
Users' time on the app
increases
Saved Recipes
The number of posts being saved
Next Steps​
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Instagram is always striving to support the sub-creative communities within the app. Exploring next steps could include how to financially support these creatives.
Increased Expansion
Branching out to other creative communities that could benefit from the linked post flow such as DIY builders or tutorials.These specific steps could change based on business category.
Adding Badges
Adding badges to posts allows
followers to support creators
Fun Fact
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All dessert photos in this case study are my own bakes!
