TL;DR
I joined the growth team at Gousto with a mission to maintain a constantly updated view of the top opportunities in the conversion funnel and validate tactics with users to reduce friction on the web and app sign up journeys.
My contribution
Product strategy
Product design
User research
Continuous discovery
Product vision
Workshops
Ways of working
The team
1 × Product Manager
1 × Product Designer
3 × Engineers
Impact
Coming soon
Overview
Gousto is a recipe box full of flavour. Precise ingredients, delicious recipes and a dollop of adventure.
I worked with the team at Gousto for over 9 months and helped ship dozens of features to increase conversion. This is just one project I kinda like, so thought I’d share it with you.
Process
Understanding the customer
The first thing I formalised with the team was a continuous discovery process where we would speak to half a dozen potential or existing customers each week to build a foundational understanding of their needs and experiences.
This case study focuses on two similar moments of friction our continuous discovery highlighted.
When a user selects their delivery day, the delivery slots are very broad leading to anxiety
When a user enters their delivery information they begin to question what happens if they are not home leading to churn
Insights
We identified two key areas in our user journey where the same anxiety presented itself. Lack of delivery slots increased anxiety as the user might not be able to guarantee they'll be home to receive the delivery within a 4 hour window leading to food being stolen or going off in the heat.
Opportunity Solution Tree
Our continuous discovery process centred around a framework known as an Opportunity Solution Tree (OST).
The top section of the OST described our outcome, which was to increase conversion rate. By positioning our Outcome at the top of the OST it ensures that everything we do flows up towards it.
The middle section of the OST is where we mapped our customer-centric opportunities. These are typically customer pain points or areas of friction witnessed through user research or identified by data.
The bottom section of the OST is where we mapped our potential solutions to improve the opportunity above. I would run regular ideation sessions with the team to cast the net wide for potential solutions to our opportunities which were then mapped on an Impact vs Effort matrix to decide which solution would provide the most value with the least amount of effort. We then tested our solutions with users to validate them.
For this project we focused on three key opportunities informed by our customer insights.
I want a more specific delivery slot
I want confidence my food will remain fresh if left outside
If I can’t be home what will happen to my delivery?
User research insights stored in Dovetail
We wanted a central resource to be able to reference user research across the entire product. We found Dovetail to be a good solution and so all the learnings from our continuous discovery were stored there.
As part of the growth team I tended to append our insights with either Push/Pull or Inertia/Anxiety using the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) forces diagram. I really like this framework as a way of mapping user sentiment for their existing solution or reactions towards the new solution.
Collaborating with the team
I ran an ideation workshop with the team to encourage collaboration and to think of customer-centric solutions to the opportunities we’d identified about delivery slots.
We then mapped the teams solutions on an Impact vs Effort matrix to give us a quick sense check on which tactics we should take to user research.
I combined some of the teams concepts from the ideation session and prepared some variations to show my thinking. Once we’d discussed the designs as a team I knew what needed tweaking and moved onto creating the designs in higher fidelity to be tested.
Solution 1: Onboarding, where anxiety is high
Constant validation that the delivery date step during onboarding was lacking information we set about trying to provide as much reassurance as possible for the least amount of effort. This step was quite early in the user journey and we felt we could be quite loud and vibrant without off-putting anyone.
Add safe place information so that the user feels reassured they can nominate a place to leave the package to reduce the chance of it being stolen
Add reassurance of courier updates so that the user feels reassured they will get a more precise delivery slot on the day
Add food packaging explanation so that the user feels reassured that if they can't be home, that the food will not go off in the sun
Solution 2: Checkout, where churn is high
Like the delivery date slot previously discussed, there was a second peak moment of anxiety during the checkout when the user input their delivery address as that is naturally when they start to wonder about the practicalities of needing to be home etc. Similar to the delivery date slot we tried to answer the users concern before they realised they had it by repeating the same information but in a slightly subtler component.
Add safe place information
Add reassurance of courier updates
Add food packaging explanation
Validating designs with users
My goal was to answer peoples questions before they even knew they had them. I combined the teams concepts from the ideation session and prepared some variations to show my thinking.
Once we’d discussed the designs as a team I knew what needed tweaking and moved onto creating the designs in higher fidelity to be tested.
I carried out several unmoderated user testing sessions to reduce risk and build conviction in our proposed solutions.
Outcome
This piece of work was about building a user-centred cadence for the team, and shipping iterative improvements. Setting some foundations for the team to take further once I rolled off the project.
This work was carried out a few years ago so things have changed slightly since my time at Gousto, but some of the learnings and designs are still live in a slightly alternative design.
Additional opportunities
As part of our continuous discovery process we built conviction in a bunch of interesting jobs and opportunities but these were not implemented during my time at Gousto. I explored pairing these jobs with Trustpilot quotes that referenced the same outcome to add some social proof.
I envisioned a multi-variant test on the delivery slot step as this was at the beginning of the funnel so would give us a very clear signal.
Busy workers who want to save time
Families who want to make planning easier
Families who want to experiment more
