Giving subscribed customers the ability to send meals to loved ones without a subscription.

Project Background

Project Background

Home Chef’s business is completely subscription-based with most customers ordering meal kits on a weekly basis. While customers are able to change the address of where their next delivery will go, they can only order one box every week. Over time, customers have expressed having a desire to be able to send meal kits to people in their lives for one-off occasions, like for someone’s birthday, while still being able to receive their own weekly meals. After some targeted customer research into the idea, the non-subscription ordering project was born.

The Challenge

At first, the concept for this project seemed straightforward – allow customers to order a box that they can send to a different address. However, as we started discussing how we would accomplish this, there were a lot of things to consider, including: When do we want to collect the address of the person receiving the box? Can current customers receive a box from another customer? Should allow the person receiving the box to make edits? and so on. With all of this and the considerations of multiple edge cases in mind, we realized we would need to take a lot of time not only figuring out what the MVP version of this new product would look like but, more importantly, how it would function.

Iterations of User flows

Through creating user flows, some initial wireframes, and low-fidelity designs, I worked to figure out what a happy path would look like for current Home Chef customers going through this new experience. Along the way, I had to consider:

  • What UI patterns can we keep in place and what new patterns can we introduce to help customers familiarize themselves with this new experience while still feeling comfortable with getting around?

  • How can we introduce our customers to this new experience within our existing website structure?

  • What new features or flows should we introduce or hold off on introducing for MVP?

Putting all the pieces together

While things like the menu structure, filtering components, and placements of CTA buttons stayed the same for our already-subscribed customers, we also had to make adjustments in order to adapt to the new flows.

We introduced the ability to add a budget to give recipients some room to adjust meals to their personal tastes. Additionally, we made it possible to see and select meals from other Home Chef meal plans right on the menu page. And, of course, we had to give our customers a more typical e-commerce checkout experience since these gift boxes are one-time purchases, rather than an ongoing subscription service.

Next Steps

While the MVP version of this project is live and available for customer use, there is still lots of work to do! Since the kickoff of this project, there have been major UI updates made to the subscription customer’s experience. While the non-subscription ordering experience was focused on nailing down the right flows and technical considerations initially, there is room to put more focus on the visual design to make this product as modern and up-to-date as the rest of the Home Chef.