iCook・April 2016- May 2016
tvOS design · UI design
The accessible tvOS application
Duration
2 weeks
My Role
My Role
Product design
Product design
Disciplines
Interviews Preference Wireframes
Prototyping
Data Research
Published
June, 2016
Made with
Background
iCook is the biggest recipe-sharing online service on web platforms & mobile apps, which are used by over 3,600,000 people and across 50+ countries in Taiwan. iCook has been focusing on web platforms since 2013. Moreover, iCook has grown more than five businesses that directly impact revenue, such as a video channel, E-commerce and Blog from 2013 to 2016.
What iCook wants to build is a one-stop service where users can highly engage our service, from exploring the cooking ideas to making the food themselves. In early 2016, I started to think about how can we extend our services out of mobile and desktop devices.
Process
The product followed the Lean UX design flow that created products that users actually want to use, both usable, useful and deliverable. The process included 3 steps; Think, Make and Check.
Define
GA Research
Google Analytics helped me to have a better understanding of our potential and existing users. The key metrics outlined what kind of categories and videos they liked and stayed longer, and more importantly, showed the behaviour flow from page to page and the average time on page in watching videos they were interested in.
The traffic of TV channel
Core features
Popular cuisine and cooking videos
We determined the 3 most popular categories, which were Collaborative kitchen, Cooking lab and iCook kitchen. The figures showed people were interested in Taiwanese traditional food and cooking skill teaching.
Videos History
Also, we noticed people watching videos with certain purposes, learning how to cook specific food or knowing the sliced vegetable. The history helped users keep videos in the list and quickly find the video they needed.
Ideat
The defined core features allowed us to create IA quickly. The flow focused on how users could watch the valuable videos we supported on the website and circled around the popular categories.
Final Product
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Key Feature
Index Screen
The tvOS was designed for users who were curious about Taiwanese cuisine food and technical cooking skills.
From the tvOS app screen, you can easily see the iconic iCook logo and land on a screen with the most popular video categories; Collaborative kitchen, Cooking lab and iCook kitchen. The covers outlined the 4 newest videos by category so that users can know the categories for.
Interactive Home Screen
Also, watching video from mobile apps is different from TV, whereas TV requires a control remote to interact with the user interface. The parallax scrolling design delivers delight to the experience and creates an engaging moment.
Into Category
The covers give users a clear understanding of the topic and information about cooking videos. The users can watch more relevant videos by clicking the card.
Each video shows titles and times while scrolling and tapping the individual cards will play the video with full screen.
Takeaway
We launched the App in May 2016 and had over 1,000+ downloads in the first month. The iCook tvOS had been the top 10 free Apps on the app store from 2013 to 2019 in Taiwan. It massively increased the critical business metrics as well as our video business; we've gotten a lot of feedback from users on social media, user voice, and the app store as well.
In June 2016, iCook was awarded The Best TV App of 2016 by Apple. It was a great successful achievement not just for me but also for the Dev team.
Challenges
This project helped me broaden my project management by setting up a brainstorming section, doing quick research and delivering design quickly but efficiently in a short period of time. The challenge wasn’t to copy and paste the same functionality from the website to TV but also to refine the useful and valuable content that people were interested in on TV devices.
Also, it was the first open source project we had at the company.
What can be improved? What’s next?
It was the last project I worked on before I left iCook. iCook released the MVP in May 2016, and the functionality only focused on simple features. Additionally, I would have liked to conduct more interviews to verify our assumptions and speak to even more tv users to improve:
- Add the login system so that users can record their watching interests and preferences on tvOS.
- Increase the engagement for users who download the tvOS and mobile applications, such as related recipes based on their watching history.