The Great Canadian Cookbook

Canadian food is about more than just poutine. Canadian food is world food. Surely there must be a rich collection of multi-cultural recipes out there for a major food culture brand like Food Network Canada to highlight and celebrate, right? It was with this in mind that we set out to create a truly Canadian food experience.

Some recent examples of “lean” personas and user journeys that I developed at Shaw Media to help an external studio understand what we were planning. This proved to be an excellent way to communicate with an external vendor without getting into defining actual interfaces. In this case, the vendor was tasked with providing the creative direction, but these user journeys depicting how the users envisioned in the personas would interact with the product as part of their everyday lives, was vital to creating a shared understanding of intent and vision.

To define experience design principles and user needs for the GCC project design team in a format that is accessible and memorable. More challenging than it seems, given the need to allow the external creative team as much freedom to do their work as possible. 

Moving beyond written requirements or whiteboard handwaving, I created a set of lean personas and journeys to ensure the agency team was aware of the various touch-points and challenges for users who wanted to upload a recipe and participate in the program. 

Using these rich visual artifacts proved to be an excellent way to communicate requirements and user needs to the design team, as well as making for a great presentation!