Transforming a food blog into a thriving community of food enthusiasts

The challenge

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.

Our approach

Our approach was 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. 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.

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.