ROLES

Lead Designer
Creative Direction

YEAR

2018

With SideChef's goal to be the end-to-end cooking experience, we needed to unify numerous features and curated content that SideChef has to offer. 

SideChef was no longer just a place to learn how to cook, but finding your next dinner inspiration and staying organized throughout the entire shopping and cooking process. 

Our user research confirmed our hypothesis that recipe images were the priority in users' decision-making. We also found that users expected SideChef to be able to save recipes and create grocery lists, features we already had—but weren't intuitive to find. 

With that knowledge, it was important for us to remove any unnecessary distractions and create a stronger emphasis on our imagery and navigation.

Unifying all the card elements across the app and web, we implemented rounded corners on the content cards to feel approachable. The strategy we implemented was to highlight the photos while adding additional tags that would help users differentiate content at a glance.

Collection cards were used to feature new articles and recipes—we were inspired by magazine covers.

As SideChef was looking to be the end-to-end cooking destination, we wanted to increase the engagement on long-form content. It was beneficial for SideChef to incorporate a new font that would improve legibility. 

Nunito Sans would replace the previously shaper and condensed font, DTL Nobel. Nunito Sans included a variety of weights, allowing control over visual hierarchy with text-heavy content. It proved to handle large bodies of text well as it gave more white space as a more open typeface. 

SideChef also wanted to be in control of the recipe content being shown on the platform, so Culinary Studio was born. Alongside the Culinary Studio team, we brainstormed on ways to capture the simplicity of a dish while still having elements that were distinctly SideChef. 

Aligning with the strategy of helping users decide on what recipe to cook, we styled ingredients besides the main dish. This would  High saturation and contrast highlighted different textures and helped create a burst of brightness from the ingredients. Finally, to keep the images lively and fun, we encouraged action shots to keep things from looking too sterile or stoic.

We restructured the Navigation Bar to better align it with our user’s behavior. We wanted to enable them to not only find recipes but also be inspired by SideChef content.

We created a new home for our newly established SideChef Premium content, showcasing our latest Culinary Partners with exclusive content.

Based on user research, we saw that users who returned to SideChef tended to save recipes. The previous version of the app hid these saved recipes within the user profile, which is not easily discoverable and hard to reach.