Little Spoon: Reimagining User Onboarding
SPRING 2022
Product Designer, User Research Lead
ROLE
UI/UX, User Research
DISCIPLINE
Designers: Joseph Casey, Isabel Li, Kate Marcotullio
Project Mentor: Jess Huang
TEAM
Janaury 2022 — June 2022
TIMELINE
CONTEXT
Many parents and caretakers of young children are frantically busy. While one of their priorities might be to feed their children healthy, nutritious foods, they don’t have the time. Here, e-commerce company Little Spoon comes in, with nutritious, flavorful foods for children of all ages, packaged into a convenient subscription box. However, most caretakers, short on time, are ordering from their phones, and finding the Little Spoon onboarding process frustrating and confusing to navigate.
How might we make signing up for Little Spoon an intuitive, frictionless, and exciting experience for parents with kids of all ages?
FINAL SOLUTION
A redesigned mobile onboarding experience that features multi-item selection, a clearer sequence of steps, and customizable profiles for children — a process with a clearer, more efficient sequence of steps while accounting for all children’s needs.
RESEARCH
RESEARCH GOALS
We wanted to understand the full context of how parents and caretakers fed their children, what people’s experiences with subscription food services looked, and what priorities came first with these services, and this helped us outline a few key research goals and their corresponding actions:
Understand Little Spoon’s mission and review its existing internal research → review research provided by Chantal and Alexa
Understand the experience and difficulties of current mobile onboarding experience → walk through the onboarding process ourselves
Understand the strengths and onboarding flows of direct and indirect competitors → conduct research on the missions and onboarding processes of 1) other baby food subscription services and 2) healthy food subscription services
Understand parents’ and caretakers’ 1) ideas around food subscriptions and 2) priorities around feeding their children → conduct user surveys and interviews
INTERNAL RESEARCH & USER FLOW
With the existing research Little Spoon had done, we found that a main point of confusion amongst the users they had surveyed was the inability to select multiple types of items in a single order. To illustrate, Little Spoon had three main item types: Plates, Smoothies, and Babyblends. For each order placed, a parent could order either only Smoothies or one of the other product types. Additionally, we learned that a lot of users made errors due to the confusing sequence of onboarding steps, like placing an order before they were ready to checkout. There were also conflicting desires for the onboarding experience between new parents and experienced parents. Overall, the user experience for mobile onboarding became increasingly confusing and time-consuming.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
To fully understand the landscape of baby food subscription services, I delegated research on direct competitors like Yumi and Once Upon A Farm, noting their product offerings, subscription structures, dietary and allergen accommodations, and onboarding processes; we repeated the same with indirect competitors, like other general food subscriptions.
USER RESEARCH: SURVEYS & INTERVIEWS
We distributed a short user survey on food subscription services, asking about respondents’ experience with food subscription services, the children they cared for, and their willingness to conduct a user interview. With 240 responses, we reached out to a few who’d had salient experience with food subscriptions or had strong opinions about how they fed their children. From this pool, we conducted two interviews. I led one of these interviews, asking a new parent questions about meal planning for their children, how they felt about food subscriptions, and onboarding for these services, ending the interviews with a walkthrough of Little Spoon’s mobile onboarding.
RESEARCH SYNTHESIS
Condensing all of our internal, competitive, and user research, our team distilled our findings into 20 overarching insights. Each insight fell under one of these broader themes: subscription convenience, digital user experience, cost vs. value, accessibility & accommodations, communication from subscription service, and sustainability. A few of our insights are listed below:
Ingredient transparency is valued to help plan for kids’ allergies and pickiness.
USER PERSONAS
From our research, we identified two distinct divisions of parents that utilized services like Little Spoon: new parents who were looking for a way to balance parenting and their previous lifestyles, and experienced parents who perhaps had multiple kids and needed to account for everyone’s eating habits. We constructed two archetypal personas from these groups, and I spearheaded the development of Kyra, the New Parent persona. Kyra and Thomas’s situations, frustrations, and goals guided our concrete ideas about how Little Spoon could support their lives.
INSIGHTS
Priorities like sustainability (e.g., with packaging) and transparency (e.g., communicating when a certain item isn’t available) generate brand sympathy from customers, encouraging users to sign up and stay on subscription plans.
Little Spoon’s current checkout process is too confusing and arduous to accommodate multiple item types.
Convenience is a huge draw for busy parents, but the convenience and food quality have to justify the cost.
IDEATION
To kick off our ideation, we assembled a mood board of screens from competitors’ onboarding process and UX features from other apps that we would potentially want to draw inspiration from. Together, we then took 8 minutes to brainstorm 8 ideas for any kind of improvements we felt would be useful to make to Little Spoon’s existing mobile onboarding. Here are mine:
KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM IDEATION
- Based on what was featured multiple times amongst our ideas and the features our team collectively believed should be prioritized, we decided on implementing the following features:
Meal selection early on in the onboarding process
A progress bar to define each step of the onboarding process and highlight where in this process new users are
Include pop-ups/expansions to explain why certain information is being asked for and to provide ways to access additional information if the user wants
ITERATION: LOFIS & MIDFIS
With a few key features drawn out from our ideation stage, each of us sketched out a basic prototype of a mobile user flow incorporating these elements. In mine (shown below), I prioritized building child-centered profiles to guide item selection and onboarding.
LOFIS: DIVERGENCE OF DESIGNS
After comparing our lofis, our team worked to translate these into digital screens, while prioritizing the key features we had decided upon. In our designs, we designed a flow that guided users through the onboarding process with explanations of why certain information was being requested, profiles for each child being shopped for, and item selection that allowed for multiple item types, followed by payment and checkout.
MIDFIS: CONVERGENCE OF FLOWS
HIGH-FIDELITY PROTOTYPES, FINAL DESIGN DECISIONS, & KEY FEATURES
Using Little Spoon’s design system, each person in our team took on a section of our designs to bring to high fidelity. In a process that took the user through all parts of onboarding, I took on item selection, designing screens for how users would select items and view their carts — this incorporated the major change of multi-item type selection that Little Spoon wanted but hadn’t yet implemented. In my designs, I allowed for item selection and the cart to be filtered by item type, which allows users to view their selections more granularly and examine important ingredient information.
Our team’s final prototype is an onboarding flow that starts from providing information about Little Spoon → creating profiles for each child, allocating optional space for food restrictions → constructing a plan out of any combination of blends, smoothies, and plates (item types) → item selection → payment and checkout. Following more standard e-commerce flows, these designs are more digestible and efficient for busy parents.
REFLECTIONS
It was exciting to focus on the UI/UX of a specific process, especially in a field that I’d had such limited personal experience with — that is, the baby food subscription service industry. It was even more enriching to collaborate with Chantal and Alexa: at a startup where Chantal is the sole designer, our team’s ideas felt tangibly valued throughout the entire project, and they took our recommendations and designs under serious consideration for implementation. While I’d want to heighten the quality of the prototypes by conducting usability testing and implementing interactive prototyping, I’m confident that our prototype did create a more navigable experience for new Little Spoon users. Thanks so much to Chantal and Alexa for a fun and supportive experience with Little Spoon — I learned more about and tried more gourmet baby food than I’d ever pictured I would.
