COOKSHOP: Experience and Evolution
PROJECT: Cookshop is a content-to-commerce experience that inspires home chefs to discover and personalize recipes, learn new techniques, hosting solutions, and seamlessly shop for everything needed. The goal of this experience for Walmart is increasing brand lift and recognition and driving purchasing consideration with inspirational episodic cooking content. The metrics we focused on as we iterated and improved was engaged views and overall engagement rate, add to cart and purchase rate and overall increased brand perception, and it was crucial to create a seamless user flow from content inspiration to shopping within the Walmart app and website, as well as engaging inspirational content that engage customers.
ROLE: Responsible for the user experience for all show content and the hub website. Provided direction on interactivity and experience design on all episodes, while working closely with production companies, vendors, and internal producers to ensure that the interactivity, pathing, UI/UX and overall experience is clear and satisfying for users. Created prototypes for new show ideas, tested and iterated on show interactivity, constantly seeking to improve the experiences.
RESULTS: In 2021, Pivoted to focus on creating quicker vertically oriented experiences for more snackable content, mostly due to high traffic driven from social platforms and 89% of audience on mobile phones. Focused design to help users easily get to their recipes and shopping lists, added persistent shopping tab so viewers could get the recipe and shop throughout the experience.
Within the first year :
Created & released 88 episodes
8.7% Click Through Rate (compared to industry standard of 2.4%)
3M Engaged views
82,000 hours total user time spent
+47% increased perception of Walmart as the place to buy kitchen and cooking supplies
+27% Increased perception of Walmart as the place to buy healthy food
+21% increased likelihood of shopping at Walmart for groceries
ORIGINAL SHOWS FOR LAUNCH
Veggie Boost with Jamie Oliver: 4 Episodes
Veggie Boost allows users to customize a veggie forward recipe, showing users quick and easy ways to eat healthy. This show includes callbacks to earlier user choices. For example, if a user indicates that they want to help their kids eat healthier, then in future choices Jamie may refer back saying things like “my kids love this broccoli and yours will too” so it feels even more personalized and speaks to what is important to users.
Mystery Basket - 6 Episodes
Mystery Basket is a cooking competition show that puts the viewer in control to make a dish with 4 random ingredients from the Mystery Basket that judges will rate.
Leveraging the production style of a linear cooking competition show, viewers make choices on behalf of a real-life chef who spells out the benefits and risks of binary choices that will affect the dish in the guise of confessional style commentary. Choice mechanics are styled in the form of a split screen to help users envision their options, and on tap the the chef seamlessly explains they are doing. Viewers get a 1-5 star rating of the final dish based on their choices, sparking lots of replays.
Over The Top with Patti LaBelle - 6 Episodes
Patti LaBelle guides viewers through customizing and transforming her line of pre-made meals and desserts for a homemade touch, taking it over the top with creative ideas.
In order to onboard viewers that this is interactive, When the first choice comes up, Patti instructs viewers to tap to choose or she will pick for them, and visually “tap to choose” pops on the screen to instruct viewers when they need to know.
Set the Table with the Pioneer Woman - 1 Episode
Ree Drummond guides viewers to set up the perfect table for their holiday and gathering needs, featuring her line of tableware and table ready cookware giving tips along the way, and the ability to shop at the end. The shop button goes to the Pioneer Woman collection page on Walmart.com.
Interactive Tasty - 15 Episodes on Cookshop + 21 episodes on eko.com
Tasty videos with an interactive twist: viewers customize their recipes with flavor choices that result in a shoppable recipe and a personality-quiz like insight.
The pacing aligns with the tasty linear format, quick and satisfying, and the choices start as early as possible and are designed to branch as the recipe moves along. Viewers are encouraged to share their final recipe, which appears as a recipe page that encourages visitors to customize their own.
WEBSITE & FEATURES
Global Commerce Flow - Initially shop and recipe appeared at the end of the episode, but users may need it sooner, or would jump before the end so we focused on ways to keep shop and recipe at front of mind, and ever present. These buttons live at a global app level and can be easily applied by code in the tool, and reflects customizations. A global structure on top of content allows us to easily apply and manage consistent buttons, update across all projects at once when needed, and keep a consistent interface for users
Fast Builder Template - In order to cut pre-production costs and effort, a templated system made project creation 50% faster overall, with a simpler interface and global buttons for the entire project.
