My digital artefact is a healthy cooking-based Instagram called ‘Lifestyle Gurus‘ that includes recipes, workouts and other healthy tips which three of my friends and I coordinate. I developed this project because I wanted to share healthy recipes to show people that healthy cooking isn’t intimidating. This was based on my own experience with Instagram pages that either count calories in their recipes or share some pictures of food they make which you then have to pay to get the recipe from an e-book or app.
Most influencers in the market of food and healthy lifestyles are educated and qualified so it seems out of reach to live healthy like them. Based on this, we wanted to produce content that felt genuine and where our users feel empowered without calorie tracking or having to subscribe to an app. Discussed more thoroughly in the Pitch Blog.
I thought this would be useful for users like myself who had trouble finding healthy recipes to cook that had minimal ingredients that aren’t too expensive or that you can find in any supermarket.
Based on this, I thought it would be useful for my users to be able to have access to healthy recipes that are easy, affordable and delicious. I decided that I would develop this Instagram page by sharing recipes from other creators and our own that we had tried and loved with a photograph and an easy-to-follow write up of the recipe.
We began by just sharing recipes at random, to creating a content schedule that we shared recipes through an ingredient for the week selected by our users. This then evolved to a different content schedule to include workouts, pictures of ourselves, quotes and recipes.
Our utility evolved throughout the semester unexpectedly. Our original utility was to share recipes to inspire people to eat healthy in a way that wasn’t intimidating for our users.
We then changed to trying to educate our users through providing information on healthy ingredients through our recipes. We did this through a poll where our users chose from two ingredients, which the most selected answer was included in all of our recipes for the week.
We found this process a little bit restricting on what we really wanted to share so we limited the ingredient of the week to one recipe in that week where we provided some extra information on that ingredient.
After this, our utility changed to being a wholistic health page as our users wanted to see workouts and responded well to seeing us in posts. This fit in well with an aesthetic we wanted to achieve and allowed a more flexible content schedule.
After some feedback through polls and in-person, our users wanted to see more balanced recipes so our utility evolved to sharing mostly healthy recipes and more personal content.
IMPORTANT LEARNING MOMENTS
Through the breaking and remaking stages of making, we broke down our lunchbox posts as some were doing better than others by a large margin.
So as the Beta blog discussed, we broke down this post into elements and realised that the posts with products in them were doing better than those without. Based on this, we decided to try out a ‘product review’ in place of the lunchbox posts.
The feedback/outcome of these posts haven’t been that successful with quite low engagement and likes. This is something we will have to reevaluate once we have tried a variety of products to see whether some will do better before we can analyse wider feedback from these posts.
Workouts was something our users suggested in our polls, we had previously tried to get feedback from comments about whether our users wanted to see more of them. But we found we were more likely to get written feedback at the end of polls in question boxes rather than comments on posts. I believe this is because our users find it easy to engage in polls and therefore feel invested by the end of the poll to recommend something. Once we started posting workouts, our engagement boosted and our users responded well by liking and saving these posts.
Personal content such as including pictures of ourselves to our page has been really helpful in boosting engagement on our page. I believe it creates a sense of authenticity to our page and allows our users to feel more connected to us and our content. These posts have been responded to with high likes and have the highest engagement metrics.
Overall, I believe we have been open to the FIST principle the whole way through this project as we have quickly iterated and prototyped new concepts to introduce to our users. We have also been able to resist the urge to defend out prototypes by listening to user feedback and adapting concepts accordingly.
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chats with chels 