Innit — Z

The Connected Kitchen

Creative Director at Innit

Democratize delicious dinners by seamlessly integrating technology into all aspects of the cooking experience.

Strategy:

The Innit smart kitchen puts food front and center, demystifying the process of making a meal for the whole household.

Design:

Leadership:

As the creative director at Innit I led the product design and visual brand experience on all platforms.

Innit is a smart kitchen platform that aims for invisibility. Rather than putting its unique set of machine learning and image recognition technologies at the forefront of the user experience, Innit instead empowers everyday people to harness this tech to cook more delicious and nutritious foods, simply and more frequently. The product strategy of leading with recipes rather than technologies was driven by customer insights discovered during user testing sessions that revealed modern heads of household are less concerned with the way they get their inspiration for meals, and more interested in products that make their lives easier by helping them figure out what to cook tonight based on the ingredients that are already in their refrigerator and pantry. In a sense, this insight shifted Innit from a technology startup to a content and media company. Ingredient tracking helped determine ripeness levels and nutritional content, but they didn’t inspire customers to want to cook a meal or use the product. Conversely, delicious looking dinners and breakfasts, communicated through images and live videos of the recipes helped to inspire more product usage and brand affinity. This project contains product interface explorations and production executions, and is based on several design sprints that were led at Innit in the spring of 2016.

The Future of Food is Now Connected.

Customers eating behaviors improve when they have a better understanding of how an ingredients nutrition changes over time.

Ingredient Stories

By allowing for a better understanding of common ingredients and their history, Innit empowers their customers to venture beyond their comfort zone and cook with a wider range of ingredients knowing when they are ripe, in season, and additional foods to pair them with. Creating distinct silos for both recipes and ingredients helps users with an additional onramp to cooking great meals, and enabled the product ecosystem to create specific alerts for when users should cook a particular item in order to get the most nutrition or flavor from it. This product strategy resulted in an orthogonal information architecture approach that built connections between ingredients, recipes, histories, and nutrition in a way that felt more like a complete story than a set of discrete technologies.

Beyond Nutrition

There is more to a life well lived than adhering to a strict regimen of health above wellness. In this sense, Innit created partnerships with editorial publications for not only five-star recipes for food, but also for libations. This helped customers better pair wine with meals, or leverage ingredients already at home for a custom cocktail. Customers developed affinity for the brand through a feeling that Innit was less big brother and more best buddy by suggesting meals or drinks that were as often naughty as nice.

Tablet to Table

The Innit design an experience feels natural on each platform and surface that it's deployed. Discovering a new recipe at home or in the store, cooking it perfectly in the kitchen, and monitoring the oven temperature and baking process on the go all need discrete features based on the nature of the device and context. Customers needed taste the chicken before the true value of the platform could be communicated, but before that could happen Innit needed to gain their trust and their taste buds by showing them the cooking journey from start to finish.