How we transformed Vikhroli Cucina with our UX Design Strategy

Project

A UX study to transform Vikhroli Cucina, a food blog by the Godrej Group into a dynamic online community for food influencers and enthusiasts in India to engage, network, and collaborate.

The client

The Godrej Group is among India's leading and most trusted brands. With revenues of over USD 4.1 billion and touching 1.1 billion consumers globally, the Group spans businesses that include consumer goods, security solutions, appliances, real estate, and agriculture, among others.

The brief

Since 2015, Godrej has been hosting a blog — Vikhroli Cucina — which has helped establish the brand's credentials in the food space. However, its content could only be published by the Vikhroli Cucina team. The idea, thus, was to take the food blog to the next level: a digital publishing website, which would encourage greater engagement by allowing readers to upload original content.

The goals of the platform were to:

• Be among the top three leading digital publishing sites (by page views and ranking) in the food space in India
• Create rich and engaging content (a mix of curated and user-generated content or UGC) 
• Monetise the platform from the third year 

The challenge

The target audience varied from celebrities to amateurs and from the digitally savvy to the digitally challenged. This led to the challenges of creating a platform that:

• Provides an intuitive, purposeful, and delightful digital experience for all
• Engages all users and encourages user-generated content 
• Delivers personalised experiences to a varied TG
• Delivers seamless experiences across all devices

Our approach – a UX study that would direct our design and content development

The UX study was a crucial aspect of website development, given the varied target audience. It would help understand their needs, match the UI to the way each user engaged on the website, and create a personalised user experience for each segment with the use of tags. In short, a UX study would help develop an intuitive website that would offer users personalised content.

Given the scope of the project, a lot of thought was put into how to make it successful and sustainable. It was decided that the digital publishing site would be carried out in two phases. The first phase would involve a mix of UGC, organic content, and personalisation and the second phase would involve taking data-driven decisions, achieving content-related targets, and monetisation.

Further, understanding the current online scenario and what it meant for our target audience was key to validating our assumptions for which we followed our systematic tried and tested 5D framework.

 

The UX study highlighted the untapped potential in the food space.

We introduced a virtual platform to strengthen the community, elevate Godrej's visibility, and drive engagement. Extensive validation led us to refine our approach, aligning with user mental models. We prioritized delivering a delightful user experience and used low-fidelity wireframes for flexible design iterations. The final visual interface incorporated key design elements from our UX research.

The impact

• 1000+ users engaging on the platform within six months of launch
• Intuitive tools enable users to get a seamless experience
• Mapped user journeys enabling each type of user to personalise the content 
• Traffic to the platform has soared as compared to the previous period

Awards galore!

After the transformation, the Vikhroli Cucina website won two awards under the Best UI/UX website categories at Afaqs Digies awards 2020 and Afaqs Marketers Excellence Awards 2021.