Melissa Cameron
Melissa Cameron
Senior Product Designer
Taste Profiles
Platform - App
Despite 89% of customers being satisfied with Gousto’s recipe variety, lack of choice remained the second biggest reason for skipping a box. This project explored whether the real challenge was not the number of recipes available, but how customers discovered them.
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Working alongside the Product Manager, I explored new ways to make choosing recipes feel more engaging, personalised and inspiring — moving beyond endless scrolling to help customers find meals they genuinely wanted to cook.
Metric - Conversion
Impact
XTRAthortful has become a successful new proposition for the business, driving strong customer adoption and creating a new way to build loyalty and encourage repeat purchasing.
Monthly Subscribers to dateÂ
47K
Active customer increase
+25%
Revenue per customer
+ 28%
DISCOVERY
Customer Problems
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Too much choice, a large menu made choosing recipes feel overwhelming.
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Endless scrolling, finding the right meal often meant browsing through a long list of recipes.
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Poor discoverability, customers struggled to surface recipes relevant to their tastes and needs.
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Limited inspiration, customers could fall back on familiar choices rather than discovering something new.
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Filtering lacked value, existing filters weren’t always helping customers narrow the menu meaningfully.
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Choice didn’t feel personal, the same browsing experience was presented regardless of individual tastes and preferences.
Problem definition
Gousto already offered customers plenty of variety, but the experience of navigating a large menu made it difficult to find relevant or inspiring recipes. The challenge wasn’t simply providing more choice, but helping customers discover the right choice.
Hypothesis: How might we make recipe discovery more engaging and personalised, helping customers find meals they’ll love without relying on endless scrolling?
Solution discovery
What does loyalty mean to customer doodles
Research
I began researching into full screen, quick fire interactions to gather inspiration and understand best practice techniques for increasing customer retention. With Gousto being a subscription service I looked at various online subscription companies, as well as popular apps, that have huge engagement rates. This library of inspiration was then used to inform and inspire ideas during an ideation workshop.
Key research insights:
1. Choice overload
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Customers valued Gousto’s variety, but navigating a large menu could feel overwhelming and make deciding harder.
2. Lack of personalisation​
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Customers wanted Gousto to better understand their tastes and surface recipes that felt relevant to them.
3. Limited inspiration​
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Customers often defaulted to familiar meals because discovering something new required too much scrolling and effort.
DEFINE
Defining the opportunity
Exploring four propositions
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Rather than jumping straight into an annual subscription model, I decided to take the insights from customers and explore 3 different propositions to pitch to the business.
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Tiered rewards
Customers would unlock increasingly valuable benefits as they shopped more, rewarding longer-term engagement with thortful. This is a similar pattern to Booking.com, the more they use the platform the more they unlock. This was a harder proposition for thortful, due to tight margins and the tiers needing to be vastly distinguishable to feel worth while.Â
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Points-based loyalty
Purchases would earn points that customers could exchange for discounts or free products, creating a clear relationship between shopping and reward. A very familiar pattern and offered by many companies such Costa Coffee, Marks & Spencer, Charlotte Tilbury and many others. This would therefore be easy for customers to understand and reduce cognitive load.
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Annual subscription
Customers would pay once a year in return for immediate benefits, including cheaper cards and increased discounts. This is a similar modal to our closest competitor Moonpig, and Bloom and Wild. From a business standpoint it would mean more equitable cash, easy to understand proposition to the customer and help customers hopefully remain loyal to having spent cash up front.Â
Free Postage
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Testing Roadmap
Concept sketches
Tiered rewards
 This concept looked at encouraging repeat purchases and build long-term customer loyalty through a progression-based rewards programme. Customers would unlock higher membership tiers based on their engagement and spending, with each tier offering increasingly valuable benefits such as exclusive discounts, free delivery, early access to new card collections, and personalised rewards.Â
The second concept focused on a points-based loyalty scheme. Customers would earn points for purchases and other activities, which could then be redeemed for discounts, free cards or exclusive rewards. This idea explored whether customers preferred the flexibility of choosing their own rewards and whether a familiar earn-and-redeem model would drive repeat engagement.
Points SystemÂ
Free Delivery
 This concept looked at encouraging repeat purchases and build long-term customer loyalty through a progression-based rewards programme. Customers would unlock higher membership tiers based on their engagement and spending, with each tier offering increasingly valuable benefits such as exclusive discounts, free delivery, early access to new card collections, and personalised rewards.Â
Design DeliveryÂ
These concepts then went back into user testing, I discussed with our customers the different offerings, showed them the high level drawings to get better confidence in which was the right decision was for us. There were several good choices for the thortful, and some aligned very closely to our competitors, however they would be worthless if our customers didn't feel like they were a good fit.Â
From all the concepts presented free delivery resonated most strongly with customers. Unlike points or tiered rewards, the value was immediate and required no additional effort customers could easily understand what they were getting and benefit from it every time they ordered. This gave us a clear direction: whatever loyalty model we pursued, the proposition needed to feel simple, tangible and valuable from the very first purchase.
Free Delivery
Challenge I overcame
While free delivery was the strongest proposition in customer research, it was one input into a wider business decision. When I presented the findings to the board, the preference was to pursue a paid annual subscription model, aligning more closely with established competitor propositions and the wider commercial direction for XTRA. My role as Senior Product Designer was to clearly communicate the customer evidence and potential trade-offs, while recognising that the final decision also needed to account for business priorities beyond UX. From there, I adapted quickly, using what we’d learned about customers — particularly their need for clear, immediate and tangible value — to shape the chosen subscription model into an experience that could work for both the customer and the business.
Proposition framing
Create XTRAthortful, a simple annual subscription designed to give customers clear and immediate value from the moment they join. Members would receive a free card on sign-up, followed by 33% off individual cards and an exclusive 4 cards for £9 bundle offer.
Wireframing
Since this was a brand new feature on the website, I created a serious of wire frames for:
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Non Subscriber Flow
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Subscriber flowÂ
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Payment FlowsÂ
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Account management Flows.
The purpose of the wireframes was to ensure that we had considered all possible touch points to inform customers, that we didn't have conflicting messages/actions that would increase cognitive load, and essentially ensure that the main flow wasn't to disrupted whilst trying to call to the service as much as possible.
MVP Phase 1
Create XTRAthortful, a simple annual subscription designed to give customers clear and immediate value from the moment they join. Members would receive a free card on sign-up, followed by 33% off individual cards and an exclusive 4 cards for £9 bundle offer.
