Case study: UX Research on Online Food Community
This is a group research project we did as a team for 10kdesigners, the following case study is my personal documentation of it!
✍ Task
- Our task was to prepare a research report on an Internet community and identify products that can be designed for the users of the community.
- Perform the research part of the design process to understand how people spend time in these Communities.
🌟 Goals
- Develop an understanding of their Behaviour and Usage Patterns.
- To understand and explain online food communities. Particularly, we deep-dived into food communities in Bangalore.
- To learn how the members of these communities are utilizing the platform and highlight in how many different ways they are currently using it.
- To Identify Products that can be designed for the users of this community
📋 Secondary Research
Secondary research is a type of research that has already been compiled, gathered, organized, and published by others. Existing data is summarized and collated to increase the overall effectiveness of the research.
What is an Online Community?
Online Community also known as a social community, virtual community, or internet community, an online community is a group of people held together by a common interest or purpose who interact with each other online.
What is an Online Food Community?
An Online food community is a place where all the food enthusiasts come together on one platform and share their recipes, their experiences, places that they have visited and most liked.
🚴♂️ Our Exploration Journey
- Firstly we started by googling a few communities which were related to food. That’s how we came across websites like ChefTalk & Chowhound.
- ChefTalk is a community of food lovers specifically dedicated to chefs.
- While Chowhound is an online resource for food enthusiasts
- Chowhound includes expert editorial and an active community forum of knowledgeable contributors.
- Then we decided to go after a bigger brand-based community to collect a large amount of data. This is how we discovered BuzzFeed — Tasty, one of the world’s largest food networks. We felt reaching out to Tasty would be a bit difficult as it’s a huge brand and connecting with their audience would be a tedious job so we decided to switch to some Indian Communities and focus on one region or city.
- Foodies and Facebook seem made for each other in this digital age, as much as bread and butter. If you are a big foodie and you love to experiment in your kitchen or simply like to read reviews online (the real ones) then these groups are a perfect place to go.
- So we decided to go with the food communities of Bangalore.
Why Facebook?
We looked at Instagram, Tasty’s pages, ChefTalk, Chowhound, and other online food communities, as well as other websites and platforms. We assumed that because Instagram is commonly used to promote businesses, customers would feel at ease there, but it turns out that Facebook has a high level of trust, therefore we chose Facebook for the following reasons:
- People felt more at ease connecting on Facebook because it has a large number of groups of people with similar interests who are also pretty active.
- It’s easy to find different groups on Facebook.
- Larger the community, easier to connect to people, ask your doubts, and collect data.
💨 What Forbes had to say about Online Food Communities
“Digital Food Community’ is Changing How Modern India Eats, One Bite At A Time
A few years back, there was an accidental discovery by a new company called Food Talk Home where they brought all the food lovers together. Food Talk India began as an invite-only Facebook group in mid-2013; about 50 people were on that list, all because they loved food and wanted an outlet to chat about what they were trying, and where to go eat in New Delhi. That number had grown to 18 thousand within six months.
“We wanted to create a community space where people could come in and share their food experiences,” she says, “if you’re looking for recommendations and what to eat at restaurants — it’s all user-based, legitimate content.”
Why Bangalore Foodie’s Club?
- It’s been in the game for more than 9 years.
- It’s the biggest and most active group of online foodies in Bangalore. Currently active Members in this group: 193K
- It is Facebook’s largest group, with a large number of members. As a result, new users are more likely to join this group because they trust this group.
- There is no spamming on this group.
- A healthy, respectful, and supportive environment is maintained.
- People come up with innovative ideas/recipes because repetition of posts more than once is not allowed.
- Everyone in the group is genuine and keen to learn new things.
About Bangalore Foodie’s Club
It is South India’s leading and fastest-growing Social Media community For Gastronomy.
⁉ Assumptions
Before diving into the research and looking up different food communities on Facebook, we had certain presumptions about them:
- The groups are not that active as most of the people have shifted over to Instagram and other social media platforms from Facebook.
- Members would mainly be working individuals who’ve shifted to Bangalore for work purposes and want to know about the famous food outlets there.
- There would rarely be an event. If it exists it would probably be a meetup.
- Group members mostly talk about famous food outlets in the group.
- Members would repeat recipes by other members.
- There would be a lot of spam if it’s a big group.
- Members would use YouTube links by other Chefs.
- Members would barely interact with each other.
- A positive and respectful environment won’t be maintained.
- Group admins would create this solely out of interest and expect no return.
📑 Primary Research
For the first three user types, we reached out to close to 50 people and managed to get insights from around 10 of them. Unfortunately, we did not get an opportunity to interview members who belong to type 4, so they are based on the posts we observed.
While reaching out to them, we ensured to make them feel comfortable and connected rather than directly jumping to questions. After going through the group’s posts and interviewing the members, we started observing a common pattern. We identified several types of users.
User Persona
We conducted one-on-one user interviews and gathered insights from the posts before creating user personas which are based on the interviews and data obtained from the posts.
🤷🏼♂️ User 1
User 1 is based on the three most active users in the group that were interviewed. We decided to interview them since we thought their views would be insightful.
This is how we approached them
Interview Questionnaires
- How do you come up with such innovative recipes?
- What inspires her to make such tempting and delicious recipes?
- How did you come across this group?
- How often do you post?
- What do you post about usually?
- Why did you choose this group? Like was there any specific reason to join this group?
- Have joined other groups as well? What’s the difference between this group and other groups?
- Have you made any friends in this group?
- If yes, then how easy was it for you to interact with them? Was food the only common topic for you all?
- Did you get an opportunity to connect with people from all over the place because of such groups?
Vaibhav’s Customer Journey Map
Scenario
🙋🏼♀️ User 2
User 2 is based on data obtained from the posts.
Advika’s Customer Journey Map
Scenario
💁🏻♀️Qualitative insights:
- The Bangalore Foodie’s Club in general is a supportive and helpful community that gives the members healthy space to post.
- The huge user and follower base that Bangalore Foodie’s Club has managed to grow creates a sense of trust among the members. However, a few of them still fear the relevance and genuineness of some posts with the emergence of social media since some moderators/admins do paid promotion.
- Members find the group user-friendly and easy to navigate.
- Most of the members in this group are also members of other food groups for likes and to gain followers.
- Few of them want to connect/talk to Gastronomes from all over India.
🔢Quantitative insights:
👇🏼Check our Google Form Survey
📈There are around 3600 posts per month, averaging down to almost 120 new posts per day.
⚡80% of the members were most active in the group and 60% were between the ages 23–40
📲About 70% of the members post a few times a week.
🍱Almost 85% of people from the community visited outlets that were posted about on the group.
⏰57% of the members spend only 5–10 mins on the group, while 28% spend 15–20 mins and only 14% spend about 30–60 mins on the group.
✅Hypothesis Validation
🧠Learning and Take-aways
- Contacting people from other states was challenging, and there was a language barrier.📱
- There were a lot of rejections and unseen texts because not everyone wanted to communicate.
- A huge amount of patience and planning skills is needed to schedule the interviews.
- I didn’t know how to carry out certain tasks, such as Hypothesis Validation and the Customer Journey Map. 🤓
- Learned about Qualitative insights by observing common patterns, types of posts, and common behaviour.
- Learned how Quantitative data is used by using Google Survey and questionnaires sent across.
- I learned how to document and present a UX Case Study, and that not all case studies are intended to build a product; some are just done for research.
⚡This community was already happy with the existing features they had, there wasn’t much of a problem or a pain point to work on, so there were no solutions or products to come up with, hence this was just to gain an understanding and explain the community.
We would like to thank Abhinav Chhikara for coming up with this team assignment and Paritosh Kumra, Aboli Joshi, and Zainab Delawala at 10kdesigners for helping us bring clarity. Also would like to thank our mentors Sagar Vijay and Sunal Sood for guiding us and giving their critique and feedback.
