Hey there, thanks for including the new ChefsFeed on Product Hunt. We’re pumped to be here! For those interested, I’ll get straight to it: our fresh-as-hell look accompanies a slew of new products, including new mobile apps, an entirely redesigned website, and more. Our content aims to be something different in the world of food media—stories that marry authenticity with beauty (i.e., series like WTF? Elevated, Mean Yelp Reviews, Opening Night, etc -- see http://www.chefsfeed.com/videos or http://www.chefsfeed.com/stories to see what I mean). It’s an approach that shuns bullshit puff pieces, and better highlights the brilliance within the food industry today, just the way our chef reviews always have. Our new branding, and the utility within our apps and website is a result of several months spent working closely with fellow chefs, restaurateurs, and all-around good eaters to better align the face we show to the world with who we really are—ferociously passionate, and unapologetically bold.
Apple featured our iOS app as a Best New App this week; my small team and I are pretty stoked on that. After months of late nights, it’s definitely validation of the vision we all fervently believe in over here. But if ChefsFeed aims to be the insider’s connection to the best dishes and food culture as recommended by the world’s top chefs, we know the real work is just beginning. We’ve got designs on the untapped potential of this community—as a conversational hub, as a marketplace, as a media disturber-of-the-peace. Did we do everything we set out to do product-wise in our four-month redesign timeframe? No. Did we get everything perfectly right? Definitely not. Are we dead-set on garnering user feedback—from both consumers and chefs—to improve? Absolutely. Enter Product Hunt.
We believe many of us are too smart to entrust our dining choices to some online troll who eats nothing but hot wings, but sees fit to pass outlandish judgment on every restaurant in a five-mile radius. We prefer to stay positive, helpful. We think our look is brighter, bolder, more visceral, and more intuitive. Hundreds of our contributing chefs—a number that grows by the hour—seem to like it. We want our products and brand to be a reflection of these amazing creators.
In order to do that, we need you to tell us what you think. We trust your opinion—unless you’re the guy whose whole diet consists only of hot wings. /RM
I had the good fortune to work on this redesign in its early days with ChefsFeed and our friends at Instrument in Portland. Ok, and then I moved to Portland.
At that time, our challenge was to grow upon ChefsFeed's success as a guide only, in a way that improved upon the app's utility without betraying its simple appeal. We debated on the usefulness of social features that had never rationalized themselves, of some design patterns we liked and didn't. We recognized growing interest in our original media, we talked to users, we talked to our chefs, we talked to the bigger industry. In the end, we settled on an approach that would solve the functional problem for a hungry fellow standing on the street at night, and the intellectual problem of another fellow who might want listen more carefully to the din of any city's restaurant scene. That meant not doing a lot of other stuff, like building the world another Foodspotting / Foursquare-like community of kind-of-contributors. It's in part an old media model, which we believed the world needed.
From a functional perspective, I feel like the trouble spots are in the accessibility and usability of data (maps, lists, menus, filters), and in user input for chefs and diners. For instance, a diner's willingness to casually Favorite or Save a few dishes in a home city or destination city might provide just enough feedback for ChefsFeed to provide some intuitive priority. That would work if you just ate stuff--we didn't really admire an onboarding experience that would require a user to arbitrarily say how they liked tacos more than pizza.
So the "The Scene" was intended to give a diner an impression of what was happening in the kitchens of his or her favorite restaurants. This will be pure magic when better realized. For now, it's food media--very artfully made in my opinion, if yet to be as practical in form as was the intent of the design.
Above all, I'm really pleased with where the brand has landed by way of color, typography, illustration, and by the clever and somehow not annoying animations and transitions throughout. Furthermore, I'm pleased that the app looks and feels like ChefsFeed sounds in long form or behind the camera. It's also so close to just telling me exactly the dish I need to eat without fail because of who I am, where I'm standing, and what's verified good. I feel like that's the natural next move for the product, and I know the team is committed to listening, caring, and making a product that works for a special audience.
Congrats to all my ChefsFeed friends on this release!
Chefs Feed