Frito-Lay was launching their "Do us a Flavor" program in the United States for the first time, which asks consumers to offer up ideas for the next great Lay's potato chip flavor.
Working from the insight that everyone thinks they've got a great idea for a potato chip flavor, we reinvented Do us a Flavor from a mail or text-in program to a social media experience that allowed participants to do what they already love to do - create, share and express themselves.
My role on the project was both creative and UX. I participated in all agency workouts at the start of the program, worked with the creative team to build our concept presentation, which I presented to the client, and then handled all the UX and Interaction Design once we had sold in our idea.
The results blew away expectations. The client asked us to try for 1.2 million submissions. What we got was:
• 12% increase in sales
• 3.8 MILLION flavor submissions
• 1.26 BILLION PR impressions
• 955 MILLION unique Facebook impressions
• Tripled the US Facebook Fanbase
• Most successfull activation program in Frito-Lay's global history
To sell the client on the experience, and help our developers put everything together, I drew an extremely detailed set of wireframes that covered every conceivable scenario a user might encounter when using our application.
To see my wireframe document, click here
Or follow along below:
To see my wireframe document, click here
Or follow along below:
In an ideal world, submitting a flavor would have been as simple as typing in a name, and we'd give you a beautifully designed bag that serves as your entry into a contest for $1 million dollars. Unfortunately things are never quite this easy. Our client required us to collect the name of the flavor, at least one ingredient that goes into it, and where the inspiration came from (so we could judge creativity in the event a winning flavor had been submitted multiple times.
To offset the extra steps, I suggested we try to be smart about names. If you told us "Pepperoni Pizza", we could probably guess that Tomato Sauce and Pepperoni are two of the ingredients, and save you time.
To offset the extra steps, I suggested we try to be smart about names. If you told us "Pepperoni Pizza", we could probably guess that Tomato Sauce and Pepperoni are two of the ingredients, and save you time.
Likewise, as users are typing in ingredient names, I suggested we be predictive with text, to avoid misspellings and guarantee that ingredient ends up on the bag.
In the end, it was possible to submit a flavor in less than 30 seconds, and you're given a beauiful professionally designed Lay's bag to share with friends.
For users who needed a little inspiration, we created Chef Symon's Profile Flavorizer. With one click, we'd scan a users profile and timeline, looking for check-ins at restaurants, or trips that have been taken, and we surfaced those memories and gave related ingredients to help spur ideas.
So for example, if you check in at a lot of Italian restaurants, we'll pull those photos and check ins, and suggest some italian themed ingredients that you could combine to submit a flavor.
If you took a trip to Spain and posted about a great paella you ate, we'd surface that and suggest seafood, rice, safron, etc.
The Flavor Gallery was a way for people to experience the millions of flavors that had been submitted by people all across the United States. More importantly, every single flavor had an "I'd Eat That" button, which triggered open graph stories on the timeline when clicked.
So, for example, if you saw "Pork and Beans" flavored chips, and clicked "I'd Eat That", a story would appear in your friends news feeds saying "Jonathan would eat Pork and Beans flavored chips on Lay's Do Us a Flavor".
To really encourage people to keep clicking that button, we designed the Flavor Showdown as the default view of the gallery. It would randomly pick two flavors and pit them against each other. Would you rather eat A or B? Each click created a timline story and helped get our app infront of more eyes.
The experience had to be mobile friendly as well. Anyone tapping on a flavor story in their newsfeed needed to be able to also submit a flavor, or browse the gallery as well. We provided the same experience as desktop for anyone on a tablet, and we built a version specific to anyone looking at our app from their phone.
We opted for a simpler experience, removing the flavorizer, bu still allowing people to create all the flavors they'd like, and easily browse a gallery of flavors, creating another timeline story with each tap of the "I'd Eat That" button.
We opted for a simpler experience, removing the flavorizer, bu still allowing people to create all the flavors they'd like, and easily browse a gallery of flavors, creating another timeline story with each tap of the "I'd Eat That" button.
