Just a moment...

Designing for family delight:

Delallo Delights

A gift box integration to connect and delight families

After diving into what does and doesn’t work about recipe apps, we built for a intimate, family-focused gift-giving experience to expand the presence of a brick-and-mortar Italian specialty food company to the digital realm via RFID-powered mobile integration with gift boxes.

Role

UX Designer
(consumer app)

Time

Jan - Feb 2023

Teammates

Joy Mukherjee
Grace Joseph
Anna Rippert

Skills used

Interaction design, service design, user research

Process overview

Lawrence Zheng

How might we

expand on Delallo's existing brand?

Delallo Foods is an Italian food company that started off in PA in 1950 but now sells ingredients nationwide. It takes pride in remaining as a family company.

Our initial hypothesis as designers was that we would be able to build brand loyalty through creating a community-based recipe app that encourage people to post family recipes utilizing Delallo ingredients.

My team was having an extended conversation so I started noting things down and grouping ideas via post-it notes.

The problem:

Recipe apps are overdone.

Through user interviews and critique, we quickly found that while people found family recipes to be valuable (and a logical way to tie into the Delallo brand), people generally felt that recipes apps were overdone. We would need something substantial to set our idea apart.

“I feel that recipe apps are overdone since there are so many out there.”

- User interview quote, repeating a sentiment held by many

I also admittedly never download recipe apps, and only use websites...

I did some more research and found that many ingredient companies that post recipes online, like Betty Crocker, have abandoned app support.

How might we

foster an increased sense of delight and familial connection compared to other recipe apps?

Idea 1

Gamified “family tree” for sharing family recipes

Idea 2

Video message integration with Delallo gift boxes

For formulating our HMW I felt strongly about pushing the “family delight” aspect of Delallo rather than trying to “do it all”.

I didn’t feel like we could compete with apps like Allrecipes for quantity, or TikTok for entertainment.

Idea 1:

Gamified “family tree” for recipes

I came up with an idea to have an olive tree graphic “grow” whenever a new family recipe was added. This was intended to add a sort of gamification and motivate family members to work together to get their family olive tree to grow.
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We ended up going with our other idea after testing both. While people felt motivated to grow the tree, they expressed doubt that they could get their family all on board long-term. There was also uncertainty around the value for Delallo if families did not use Italian ingredients.

I really like the idea of using something organic as a fun way to represent progress, rather than a simple number or bar.

Idea 2:

Video message integration

An idea that came to us when we focused on the idea of creating family connection through food was the idea of focusing specifically on the gift-giving experience rather than simply sharing recipes.

Delallo already sells gift boxes, which can be ordered and customized on their website. What if we added a digital component to these gift boxes to make it feel more personal?

It was an a-ha moment when we started thinking about the gifting experience specifically!

Introducing our final design for adding a sense of delight and familial connection to recipients of Delallo gift boxes

Sparking delight

View embedded video messages from loved ones upon opening a gift box

A gift message from the sender automatically plays when phone is placed on the physical box. This is possible using RFID scanning - an RFID tag is embed inside a phone holder, which is scanned when the phone is placed.

Through the integration of a digital component to a physical gift, the perceived value of the gift is greater and the gift feels more delightful. The gift also feels more intimate with the addition of a gift message directly from a loved one.

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