Justifying a Platform Refactor

The Inherited Problem

The Relaunched Solution

I joined Plated after it was acquired by Albertsons, a billion dollar grocery company, at that time when there was stagnant growth in the meal kit industry. Plated was shifting its goals from focusing on customer growth toward increasing the lifetime value of existing customers.

When I started at Plated, two important things happened:

• I helped two cross-functional teams design and launch three MVPs that tested customer demand of new physical products: Brunch, Protein Upgrades, and Pantry Items
• I scrutinized how the existing digital platform handled new functionality and realized the speed at which we tested MVPs wouldn't be fast enough to hit any future goals

Brunch MVP, Limited Rollout with interim brand refresh

Once we validated demand and knew customers would purchase more, the platform would need those three independent MVPs combined for nationwide rollouts all while the next dozen products and features were queuing up.

The platform was past its sell-by date

• The website, iOS, and Android apps were all designed and built at separate times and by different teams. Okay.
• There were inconsistent user flows and design decisions between the platforms. Manageable.
• The content and organization of the frontend was heavily restricted by the backend. Not shocking.
• There was very little functionality to communicate anything "new" to users on the platform itself. That's odd.
• The time it took the website to load before interactivity was in double digit seconds. Egads.
• There were "Seven Layers" of CSS that styled the web app. Wait, really?

The case to be made for refactoring the digital platform was now worth making. It was the solution when considering all of these issues. Otherwise, the platform would make any new functionality painful to add and consume an exorbitant amount of time and resources. Sure, there was a lot of work to do, but we also had a window of opportunity opening up.

Our Approach

Our two-pronged approach while refactoring:

• Evolve from a subscription UX to a more flexible e-commerce UX
• Design mobile-first to unify the UX across all platforms

With a plan on our plate, we secured approvals with Culinary, Marketing, and Executive Leadership. We then went to work on the refactor while Ops and Fulfillment prepped for nationwide rollouts of the three recently validated MVPs.

How we executed and launched successfully:

• Worked with our Data Scientist to gather existing user insights
• Wireframed major changes early for cross-functional approvals
• User tested interactive prototypes to verify our assumptions
• Built, iterated, and dogfooded the new platform prior to launch

Research

Mapping User Behavior

I worked with our Data Scientist to set a behavioral baseline. Then I identified which paths, features, and functionality were core to our customers' experience while managing their weekly boxes. That baseline helped us focus our efforts and inform design decisions to do no harm to our Average Order Value and Utilization Rate.

Design Process

Mobile Wireframe

User Test Prototype

Revised Prototype

Final MVP

Iterating through the "Menu View"

I oversaw the Product Designer and helped move them through testing our assumptions and prototyping with Plated subscribers. We confirmed two things: users could still perform core tasks and find "new" products. Then I helped identify what we should continue to retweak and test before polishing up the final designs for the engineers.

Desktop Prototype

Final Desktop MVP

Results

Capturing where users clicked

Spoiler alert: Albertsons shut down Plated's subscription product. Despite the news, the team decided to launch in the spirit of achieving what we set out to do: refactor the platform. We knew we couldn't validate the test with only one week of results, but we were proud of the early data (albeit mostly biased due to pending closure).

We did have some wins, with even more in the pipeline:

• 6x performance boost based on Lighthouse Metrics
• One week of results maintained Average Order Value and Utilization Rates

• Designed and built Android MVP in two weeks, for testing
• Kicked off iOS designs with engineering, for a 1-month build
• Newly designed "Discovery" experience for new product announcements, ready for rollout

Mobile Web

Desktop Web

iOS & Android Apps