Weber
Website, iPad & iPhone Apps
As design lead for Weber, I drove the creative direction of their website, iPhone and iPad apps, community and media portals, ad campaigns, and a series of cookbooks. Outcomes included increased community engagement, featured status on the App Store and thousands of app downloads annually.
Contributions
- Design Vision
- Workshopping
- Prototyping
- Concepting
- UX Design
- UI Design
- Design Iteration
The Ask
The initial incarnation of the Weber Brand on the iPhone was completely proactive. The client often looked to us to bring innovative concepts to the table. We knew there was an opportunity to bring Weber Grills to the iPhone. We just had to figure out what form that app would take.
Investigation
We started by investigating what aspects of the Weber brand would be best suited on a mobile device. At the time, in addition to their successful line of grilling products and accessories, Weber had a line of well received cookbooks, an active online community, an e-newsletter series, a help portal, and a responsive website offering product information.
Ideation
We explored what features of the website and aspects of the online community were driving the most usage and found that recipes and how-to guides were extremely well received and had heavy engagement.
We figured that the quickest way to market would be to repurpose their grilling how-to materials into an interactive grilling companion. We reached out to customers to understand if this would be of interest and looked at several other popular apps of the time to understand what features capabilities were motivating users and were selling in the highest numbers.
Recipes as a Foundation
Recipes would indeed become the core of the application and we would build around that. We had a large number of existing recipes and were working with a chef to create new ones all the time. We went to market with a robust selection of meals and more in the pipeline to keep users coming back for fresh ideas.
Shopping Lists and Timers
We also saw an opportunity to make them more interactive by including grilling timers, quick shopping lists, and video tutorials. What we ended up building was a mechanism to turn amateurs into intermediate and expert grillers, thus building enthusiasm around the brand and increasing sales and retention.
We produced rapid prototypes to identify if the capabilities we wanted to make interactive such as grilling timers, quick-create shopping lists, video learning tools, and the recipes themselves were usable and compelling.
User Outcomes
Downloads of the app out of the gates were huge. We immediately started to learn what features were most valuable to our users as well as what friction needed to be addressed. The community was extremely passionate and vocal which made further prioritization of improvements easy.
Reception and Next Steps
Before long, we had addressed the major pain points and started to really gain traction. We began working with Apple directly on subsequent versions of the app that brought more innovations to the table as well as an iPad app once that became a thing. We were featured in Communication Arts for Design and were regularly featured on the App Store, particularly in the Spring to kick off annual grilling seasons
