Meet Imperfect Foods
Groceries that make an impact
Imperfect Foods is a subscription grocery service with a mission to build a kinder, less wasteful world. They’ve saved over 145 million pounds of food (and counting)! As they evolved from Imperfect Produce to Imperfect Foods, they expanded their aisles of shoppable food items and created innovative private-label goods. They looked to recreate their site experience to tell their unique and impactful brand story.
Storyboarding by Sarah Jutras; final animation by Imperfect Foods’ creative team
Project Lead
During my time as Co-CEO of the agency Make&Model, Imperfect Foods came to us looking to revitalize an outdated site experience that wasn’t on par with the evolution that the brand had had on their food products and member experience. Our goal for this site redesign was to focus on digital storytelling, clarifying the Imperfect Foods services for new customers and infusing their fun and playful brand into the site experience. For this work, I led UX Strategy & Design , working through the following phases from conception to build out:
Services
UX Research
Content & Brand Strategy
Information Architecture
Interaction Design & Prototyping for responsive web
Creative Direction
Visual UI Design
Discovery
We began the discovery phase with a collaborative kickoff involving key stakeholders in Product, Brand, and Sustainability. We worked together to reframe the site objectives into the following goals:
Increase conversion rates of new customer sign ups
Identify opportunities to better show the product offering, that may lead to increase in customer cart size once acquired
Better educate the service, its value, and the sustainability story to prospective customers
Highlight the delight and distinction of the brand as the most-sustainable grocery company along with the reveal of exclusive delicious products
“..it sounds like you are providing an opportunity to help eliminate waste, perhaps at a discount. If its good for me, good for the planet, and good for my wallet, badabing badaboom, I’m sold.”
— Prospective customer, research study
Storyboarding by Sarah Jutras; final animation by Imperfect Foods’ creative team
Research
The outcomes of various user research initiatives were gaining insights about prospective customers’ discovery and selection of a new grocery service, customer decision trees, understanding of the effectiveness of the overall user experience, and the usability of designed prototypes. Research methodologies included:
Calls with internal customer support team to synthesize their findings
Review of support tickets and service cancellations
Support on survey initiatives
Interviews for validation of content strategy, information architecture, and key terms
Usability interviews
Designing for Delight
Storyboarding by Sarah Jutras; final animation by Imperfect Foods’ creative team
Visual Design
One of the core design principles for this work was ‘designing for delight’. With such a playful and energetic brand, it was important to bring those characteristics and values to life on the revamped .com site. Food is joyful and saving the planet should be exhilarating, not scary. We were keen to leverage Imperfect Foods’ distinct illustration styles and bright colors, expanding the color palette, mostly tailored to packaging, to work best for a digital manifestation.
Interactivity
Opportunities to storyboard animation were leveraged to create dynamic and interactive site experience that would add to the compelling storytelling.
Design System
A design system was created so that components and modules could be repurposed with the goal of bridging the marketing site experience with the member signed-in product experience and mobile app
