The Community Chef

An online platform for professional chefs to connect and share their knowledge and skills with aspiring chefs

Team

Solo Project

Timeline

6 Weeks

Tools Used

Miro, Optimal workshop

My Role

UX/UI Design, Information Architecture

About

The Community Chef is a platform for cooking enthusiasts and aspiring chefs to enhance their cooking skills through classes by professional chefs as well as find cooking related jobs and events.

My Design Journey

Business Goals
User Needs
Persona

Competitor Analysis

Tree Testing
Card Sorting

Sitemap

Low Fidelity
High Fidelity 

Define

Business Goals

  1. To build a community of aspiring and professional chefs to connect with each other.
  2. Help Aspiring chefs/home chefs to learn from the professionals.
  3. Build a community driven recruiting forum for chefs

User Needs

  1. For professionals to share their skills and an opportunity to give back to the society.
  2. Help aspiring chefs to learn from the experts.
  3. 3. Help chefs land their next job.
 
 

Persona

Image of Persona for Community Chef
Image of Persona for Community Chef

Competitor Analysis

To conduct my competitor analysis, I first identified four existing competitors in the market. I listed a few tasks that the users would perform on the websites and created a comparison table. The main purpose of this was to:
1. Understand competitor product.
2. Identify the gaps in the market.
3. Help further refine my business goals and offerings.
4. Help differentiate my business from the competitors

Image of Competitor Analysis for Community Chef

Competitor Analysis Takeaways

Competitors are not facilitating interactions between aspiring chefs and professional chefs
Competitors do not provide a platform to host classes by professional chefs. They can only post videos.
Competitors do not provide a hiring/recruiting platform

User Testing

Card Sorting

In order to design an effective information architecture, it was important to understand my users mental models and how they would expect to find content. The logical next step was to conduct an online card sort. I had 12 participants and a list of 29 tasks that needed to be categorized. My participants created a total of 95 categories with a median of 8 categories each.The card sorting insights helped me design an abstract structure.
Image of Abstract Structure

Tree Testing

I conducted a tree test with 15 participants and  with 12 tasks to complete. Here are some insights

Image of Treetesting Insights

Site Map

Sitemap created after the insights gained from card sorting and tree testing. 

Image of sitemap for Community Chef

Design

Low Fidelity Wireframe

Image of Wireframe for community chef homescreen

High Fidelity Mockup

Image of community chef homescreen

Learnings

This project has been particularly enjoyable and unlike my other projects. I have very valuable takeaways from this project.

1. I understand thoroughly the role and importance of Information Architecture for any business/website/app
2. The various tools used in the industry to design an effective Information Architecture
3. The importance of testing Information Architecture at an early stage in the market.
4. The importance of understanding users mental models to be able to design and effective solution