Brava Home Custom Cook & Profile Discovery

Empowering innovative cooking solution

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Brava is an intelligent countertop oven, disrupting the kitchen technology field with Pure Light cooking.
‍
The product team at Brava constantly looks for new ways to engage our users and deliver more lifetime value to improve user satisfaction and ultimately drive sales and business growth.

In this project, my main goal was to empower users to cook with more flexibility and confidence at home, by easily discovering content published by other users.

MY ROLE

product designer (Web, app)

Team

PM, design director, another oven UX designer, engineers

TIMELINE

3 months, 2020-2021

Problem Statement

Home chefs have no easy way to discover other people and their Custom Cooks for inspiration. As the Status quo, users have to rely on Brava Facebook Community to share their experiences, Custom Cooks, or get their questions answered. However, not all users are on Facebook.

User stories

Research & Discovery

//Foundational User Research
//Desktop Research
//Stakeholder Interviews
//Journey Maping

Big Picture Takeaways

1. A significant group of users would like more variety of food to cook. 1 in 3 users looks to "star chefs" in the community to create Custom Cook programs for their inspiration.

2. Although still a small number of users create Custom Cooks right now, people are excited about creating Custom Cooks and sharing them publicly. However, there are always many things going on in the community and Custom Cook information gets buried fast and is hard to find again.

3. A related problem that is also important considering the end-to-end journey, is to make Custom Cook creation/edit flow easier so more people can contribute to content generation. (this is out of scope for v1 because there're a lot of moving pieces in terms of constraints)

Problem Statement

How might we
connect our users to empower them to discover high-quality Custom Cooks created by others easily to inspire them to cook with more flexibility and confidence?

User Stories I focused on

User stories

Key Metrics

The PM and I decided to watch out for these two metrics for this project:

 • App weekly active user • Feature level usage

1. Browse and search Custom Cooks

Current Recipe Browse & Search

New, My own profile page

Idea Exploration

I explored a couple of directions for Custom Cook browse.

New, My own profile page

MVP Flow

Without adding too much to the engineering scope, I focused on defining the MVP, which consists of a searchable list of Custom Cooks that links out to the Custom Cook details page.  

New, My own profile page

2. Stay on top of inspiration by following users

An important linked attribute of Custom Cooks is the creator profile, which is a completely new feature. I worked on what the private vs public view looks like for a user profile, how to discover & follow a profile, as well as defining the touch-points for prompting users to edit their profile.

Private Profile Prototype

How's the Public view of your personal profile different?

Taking data privacy into consideration, I decided to hide Recent Cooks on a Profile public view.

How to recommend users of people to follow?

Apart from naturally discovering other people when visiting Custom Cooks, I proposed to introduce "Top Chefs" in a number of places.

New, My own profile page

Profile Image Alternative Explorations

New, My own profile page

How do we prompt users to edit their Profile?

Typing on a keyboard on a fixed 5' X 7' horizontal screen poses a lot of friction. Also, there's not an easy way to add a photo from the oven screen.

I focused on getting the app profile initial edit flow solidified while creating a pathway between the Brava oven and the app so that the user can create a profile with less physical effort.

App profile introduction flows

Web profile creation for a new customer

Oven UI profile introduction notification

3: Stay in the loop by getting notified

To drive user reengagement, I proposed a list of app & email notifications to add to our existing cooking notifications on the oven & reviewed it with PM & engineering to get buy-in.

I explored 3 different layout options of Notification settings, and after reviewing with the team, we ended up going in the direction of option C which group notification by type instead of the channel and has a flat IA.

Do we need an in-app Notification Center?

While in-app notification allows users to go back to view notifications in the past easy in the native product, it's a lot of work on the backend and not an absolute must from the UX perspective. To build cheap and fast, we decided to first utilize system-provided push notifications as the MVP and monitor if there's a need for a more advanced solution.

Do we need to compile notifications?

One concern raised by the PM is regarding the edge case when a star chef gets bombarded with notifications. Realistically we're far away from this concern just yet, and users can choose to mute notifications from their devices(except time-sensitive ones) or turn off certain types of notifications from the app. In the end, we decided to release v1 without worrying too much to perfect the solution for this very edge case.

The Outcome

Custom Cook Discovery and Public Profile Launched in 2020. In the first 3 months, 90% of total active users have modified their profile. About 12% of app users visit Custom Cook Search Page weekly.

Notification is recently launched in 2022 and starting to serve all our customers.

Our NPS increased to 45 in 2020(compared to 33 in 2019) when most of the features I worked on rolled out.
‍

Next Step: Refined Custom Cook Create & Edit flow

Another more complex problem I worked on as a part of the end-to-end Custom Cook engagement journey is making it easier to create and edit it in the first place. As a part of design exploration, I did the following

• Optimized ingredient & equipment input, for better search & filter scalability.
• Better step-by-step instructions input with step image, giving more guidance to content consumers.
• Allow users to set up/modify Recipe programs & on-screen guide text directly from the app.

Medium-fi wireframe for Custom Cook Edit flow

Closing Thoughts


There's still a long way to go to improve user engagement at Brava.

Here're my takeaways from this journey:
‍
1. Solving problems across multiple platforms & different channels, taking different behavioral/usage patterns into account.
‍
2. Simplifying and defining projects MVP with PM, especially when the engineering resource is limited. Build fast and cheap; while still being able to advocate for good design principles.
‍
3. An idea needs to be sold internally first, to get buy-in to officially kick-start a project. You can always do something to make your product/services better. Don't wait to be unblocked– take action.