Recipes Store

An app store

2013-2015 @ TIBCO Software | Enterprise Software; Flows

"A new user wants to discover the value of the service as soon as possible"

When people ever got anything new: a new toy, a new jacket, or a new mobile app, what’s the first thing they will do? Try it out! Being a new online service, our product soon will have a considerable number of new users, either they are invited or happen to visit the site because they are searching for work/data automation. We will want these first group of users to taste the sweetness of the service the sooner the better, so to increase their loyalty.

Glossary: A recipe is an automated workflow that connects different online services/apps.

Goal: a “10 minute success” experience

A new user building an recipe could become time-consuming, depending on how complex his/her work is. My mission is to effectively reduce the time user spends on building, and create a design to help them successfully run a recipe within 10 minutes.

TWO MEANS OF ACHIEVING THE GOAL:

Simplify the recipe builder and make it extremely easy for user to build a new recipe. (See project: Natural Language Form)
Provide pre-built recipes, so user skips most part of the complicated building process.

decision on Concept

I brainstormed with the product team about how to store these pre-built recipes, several ideas were generated, leading us to later decisions.

For example, one straightforward idea was the "template" screen we see when open up the Microsoft Word or Powerpoint. It actually tackles the current problem, but becomes less useful in the longer term. Those 50 templates are fairly useful for people who need to write a document (a letter, a resume, or an invitation), because the format does not change. But there are unlimited number of online services, as well as unlimited number of business automation use cases that are constantly changing. So I started to think about user generated content.

I also looked into app stores including Apple App Store, Google Play and Salesforce AppExchange. I found the concept of an app store addresses our goal very well:

For a short term, as mentioned, it allows new user to avoid the complex of building. User only need to enter username and password to authorize connection to 3rd party online service. This drastically decreases the difficulty.
For a long term, it is actually a creation of a user community. When a user shares an recipe he/she builds, new users who come later can use it. Gradually, the recipe store covers many use cases even for the changing market. Plus, the existing users' contributions help increase the new user's trust on our system.

So we've decided on building an app store for recipes.

Started with User flows

Initial Design

To provide a consistent experience across the company’s products, I’ve continued using card as the basic design element.

But more discussion and design was about what information is shown to gain user’s trust on this new online service, such as a creditable recipe provider's name, number of user, rating from user, etc.