Monj.com

Build lifelong cooking skills and a passion for food!

People don't know how to cook! Not knowing how to cook is one of the main reasons people don't eat healthy. Monj is a skilling application. Monj is sold as a work perk. The challenge was to design an application that was fun, flexible and guided. On this project, I helped assemble the dev team, create the investor deck, help the team define and focus on specific personas, design the overall application architecture, design the details, help guide and mentor a few internal designers, usability test the experience and get a beta launched. This was a 3 months project running at 3 days a week.

Concept Sketches

Projects need exploration. The image is a collection of the ideas tossed around before we settled on the ideal experience.

Application Flow

Should we let people sample the application before they sign up? Absolutely. The application flow above provides a way of moving a user from public experience to authenticated experience. Even if people don't sign up, you have a marketing win anytime people try your application.

Recipe Cards

One of the challenges with the experience was finding a model that can balance guided, step-by-step skilling experience with a flexible experience. The recipe card tray was the solution. We automatically recommend the next dish, we track what you accomplished and we automatically move the tray along. When people finish a collection, we recommend the next collection. We also understood that tastes differ and at any moment, people might want to cook something different. The tray slides on touch and people can select a different meal or switch collections. On launch, people always have something to cook.

Recommendation

Mustafa has made critical contributions to our product in a short time, making it simpler, more focused and more immediately impactful. He's a pleasure to work with: very pragmatic, works quickly, challenges your thinking when it needs to be, adapts to budget and technical constraints, gets all the details worked out and is genuinely nice person. I've extended his role on our team twice as of this writing and highly recommend him.

Steve Harshbarger
President at Monj + Multipop