Meal Kit Website UX Audit
What are the top 40 UX improvements for your Meal Kit website? How does your UX performance compare to Blue Apron, HelloFresh, Marley Spoon, Sunbasket, etc.?
Based on the findings from Baymard Institute’s 150,000+ hours of User Experience (UX) research, Baymard will conduct a Meal Kit website UX audit.
The in-depth Meal Kit UX audit will be based on 400+ weighted UX parameters uncovered during our large-scale UX testing of meal kit sales sites. This will provide you with:
- a detailed 120+ page audit report outlining 40 prioritized and research-backed user experience improvements for your meal kit site,
- provide best practice implementation examples and inspiration from other meal kit sites, for each of the 40 identified UX improvements to your site,
- a detailed unbiased UX performance analysis across the 400+ UX parameters to document your current state and identify the best areas to improve,
- compare your site’s UX performance directy to the performance of other meal kit sites: Able & Cole, Blue Apron, Green Chef, Gousto, HelloFresh, Marley Spoon, Purple Carrot, and Sunbasket.
Learn more about our Meal Kit UX audit analysis, deliverables, and costs in the 5 sections below:
“The recommendations in our audit were awesome - well prioritized, actionable and helped us focus on what to optimize. This audit, along with the e-Commerce Reports & Benchmark Databases, are my go-to resources for thorough, insightful information. Thank you!”
What’s Included in a Meal Kit Website UX Audit?
A full UX analysis and assessment of your desktop and mobile websites — conducted every year by lead UX researchers at Baymard Institute, utilizing Baymard’s more than 150,000+ hours of large-scale UX research.
7 detailed UX scorecards with a total of 400+ UX performance scoring parameters, used for direct UX performance comparison against other online meal kit websites (Able & Cole, Blue Apron, Green Chef, Gousto, HelloFresh, Marley Spoon, Purple Carrot, and Sunbasket). You'll also get a UX comparison to other industry sites (like Grocery, Food Delivery & Takeout, etc.), to benchmark how your site stacks up to general user expectations.
The auditors will write a detailed 120+ page report with 40 suggestions for UX improvement. Each suggestion includes a description of the identified user experience issue along with a proposed solution and 2–4 best practice examples from other meal kit sites, and occationally examples outside the meal kit industry for cross-industry inspiration.
A 2-hour video conference where we go over the audit results with you and your team, to discuss the findings and suggestions for improvements.
12 follow-up calls with your UX auditor after delivering the UX audit findings. For feedback on any redesigns you create, a light review of prototypes, questions, etc.
A detailed Year-Over-Year UX performance comparison to past audits – documenting your UX progress, and showing how you stack up to the competition and to user’s increasing expectations, every year.
Your whole organization gets annual complimentary access to Baymard Premium with full access to Baymard’s 150,000+ hours of UX research findings, UX certification, etc. (normally $2600/year).
“Thank you, this was really insightful!”
UX Audit Focus
The audit will cover the following areas of your online user experience:
Homepage — The homepage structure, design, carousels, personalization, and promotions.
Main Navigation — The main navigation design and structure, mega drop-down menus, visual hierarchy, courtesy non-product navigation, etc.
Site-Wide Layout — Site-wide layouts, footers, newsletter dialogs, ad positioning, and return policy links, etc.
Plan Matrix & Selection — the Subscription plan matrix structure and design, subscription FAQ section, how to display subscription costs, flow for presenting 'meals' and 'servings', shipping costs, etc.
'How It Works' Pages and Plan Quizzes — structure and design of 'how it works'-pages, content needed on 'how it works' and other info pages, 'about the brand' pages and similar brand-characteristics pages, interlinking of informational pages, plan selection quizzes.
List Layout — The design and features of the overall recipe list, mobile list items, “responsive upscaling” of listing pages, etc.
Recipe List Items — what information to include for each Recipe List or menu item, how to format and display it, thumbnails in each list item, what they depict, their size, hover-enabled thumbnails, etc. etc.
Recipe Sorting & Filtering — Recipe sorting and filtering interface, including the minimum number and types of sort options needed by meal kit users, and more.
Recipe Page Layout and Structure — Overall structure of the recipe pages, layout, collapsed and tabbed information, mobile layouts, subpages, recently viewed, etc.
Recipe Information, Images, and Design — How users engage with and rely on information and descriptions, the type of content needed, headlines, sub-titles, ideal text structure and styling, etc.
Signup & Account Creation — Account creation design and communication, “Delayed Account Creation”, social media accounts, password rules, etc.
Customer & Address Information — Privacy concerns, shipping addresses, billing addresses, international addresses, phone fields, address auto-detection techniques, etc.
Payment Flow & Methods (includes Third-Party) — The payment methods interface, how to integrate and display third-party payment options, gift card redemption flows, international currencies, coupon codes, etc.
Credit Card Form — The credit card field design and its validation logic and formatting, along with the expiration date, security code, and cardholder name inputs, field sequence, card icons, and card type selection.
Order Review — Review step design, “Place Order” button placement, and necessary review data, along with its editing flow.
Order Confirmation & E-Mail (to the extent it’s possible to access this) — The information and actions needed on the order confirmation page, along with the order confirmation e-mail.
Checkout Page Design — Checkout process steps, “Enclosed Checkout” designs, order summary sidebars, and how to design and position the cart link in the site-wide header.
Cross-Sells — Active vs. passive cross-selling, adapting cross-sells to user context, and pitfalls of specific placements and wording.
Form Design & Features — How to design and position the primary button, “Apply” buttons, minimizing form intimidation, multi-column layouts, tabbing flows, CAPTCHAs, back-button and enter-keystroke behavior.
Validation Errors & Address Validators — How to design and position error messages, how to word them, and persisting data in non-secure and secure form fields, inline validation. When address validations are necessary, “Force-Proceeding” through address validators, along with address validator design and logic.
Field Design & Features — Marking optional and required fields, field label position, tooltips, and optimizing microcopy and descriptions. Drop-downs and radio button implementations, input masks and character restrictions, custom designed input fields, etc. Intelligent form features, including inferred selections, pre-fills, auto-fills, and personalization of the checkout flow.
‘My Account’ Sign-In — Account sign in, including password reset and account lockouts, “Soft” sign in, automatic sign out, and where users should be sent after signing in.
‘My Account’ Drop-Down — Placement of the “My Account” drop-down menu, account features to include, how the “My Account” drop-down should be structured and styled, personalization, and what “My Account” drop-down implementations should be avoided.
‘My Account’ Dashboard — Providing paths to all ‘My Account’ features, highlighting recent orders, limiting ads, and using icons; dashboard designs that use a sidebar or “Cards“ for navigation.
‘My Account’ Stored Addresses, Cards, and Newsletters — Credit card updating flow, default addresses, editing vs. adding a new address, newsletter frequency and “unsubscribe“, confirmations, and ‘Apply’ buttons.
Mobile Basics — Content and structure of mobile site vs. desktop site, size and spacing of of hit areas, multiple hit-areas within the same visual element, font-sizes, landscape mode, bugs and quirks vulnerable to the mobile platform, auto-zoom, etc.
Mobile Site Homepage & Main Navigation — Main navigation design and logic, double-hit area issues, homepage structure and design, auto-rotating carousels, etc.
Mobile Search — User’s crossover from category navigation to search, search scopes, misspellings and synonyms, search query support, “No results” pages, Faceted Search filters, etc.
Mobile Recipe Listings — List item size, thumbnail size, amount of attributes in list items, hit areas within the listing page, separation of list items, pagination vs. load more vs. endless scrolling, visual indicators, list item interactions on a touch screen, etc.
Mobile Filtering & Sorting — Styling and position of both “filter” and “Sort” options, sort types, “apply” buttons vs. auto-applying filtering values, the display of applied filters, information scent, filtering interface, etc.
Mobile Recipe Pages — mobile layouts, recipe imagery and text on mobile devices, image zoom levels, touch gestures for images and text, etc. etc.
Mobile Checkout Steps — account signup, typing addresses, payment methods, order review, linear checkout flows, mobile process steps, etc.
Mobile Checkout UX — Optional vs. required fields, minimizing number of fields, form field label placement in smartphone portrait and landscape modes, inline labels, floating labels, grouping checkout info for mobile overview, field context, location detection, touch keyboard auto-correct, optimized keyboards, auto-capitalization, etc.
Custom Meal Kit Competitors
In addition to auditing your site UX and comparing it to 8 leading meal kit sites (Able & Cole, Blue Apron, Green Chef, Gousto, HelloFresh, Marley Spoon, Purple Carrot, and Sunbasket), we can also expand the project scope to include a custom competitive audit against any local or direct meal kit competitor(s) you’d like. This is available for sites in most countries and languages.
“Intelligent, consumer-focused insights that are clear and actionable. The team in the room really loved the way the Baymard Institute highlighted the optimizations in the various user experience elements (copy, layout, design, calls-to-action…), from the perspective of consumer struggles. Baymard’s Usability research really complements our other existing research tools.”
What Are Audits For?
Most commonly, our UX audit services are used by:
- Sites that would like to benchmark their UX performance to see how they stack up against major competitors and “State of the Art” sites, to know where resources are best spent on further UX improvements.
- Sites that would like inspiration and verification of their new redesign. For example, before spending resources on the final production code — auditing prototype designs are cheaper than re-coding.
- Optimized sites that need a pair of external and unbiased eyes to identify the last tweaks and improvements.
- Sites that would like to track their UX performance year-over-year, to measure and document UX progress towards stakeholders and over time.
Return on Investment
Even the smallest improvement in conversion rate for any site with significant sales will lead to a notable return on investment. For example, an improvement from 3.1% to 3.6% in conversion rate for a site with $50,000,000 annual sales will yield $8,060,000 extra sales every year.
“I just wanted to take a minute to thank you for the amazing work on this audit. You should know that this has been very well received internally and there’s a lot of excitement around adopting the ideas you have shared.”
How Will the Audit Be Delivered?
What Will It Cost?
An annual Meal Kit UX audit across the desktop and mobile website costs $13,100 (USD) per year.
An annual ‘Meal Kit UX audit’ includes:
A full UX review and analysis by Baymard’s team of UX researchers of both your desktop and mobile sales websites.
7 detailed UX performance scorecards with a total of 400+ review parameters, and with performance comparison against Able & Cole, Blue Apron, Green Chef, Gousto, HelloFresh, Marley Spoon, Purple Carrot, and Sunbasket.
A 120+ page audit report with 40 prioritized suggestions for UX improvements. Each explain the identified UX issue, the suggested change, and show 2–4 best practice implementation examples from leading meal kit sites and general industry leaders.
A 2-hour video conference with you and your team to discuss the audit results.
12 follow-up calls with your UX auditor. Useful for follow-up questions or feedback on your redesigns or prototypes.
- 12 months of complimentary access to a Baymard Premium ‘Specialty’ plan with full access to Baymard’s 150,000+ hours of UX research findings (normally $2600/year).
Reach out below to discuss your needs or request a UX audit of your meal kit site. (PS client audits are strictly confidential and will not be included in Baymard’s public UX benchmark database).
Talk to UX auditor Laura about your goals and discuss Baymard’s UX research methodology.
Meal Kits Audit Price
$13,100
per audit
Refund Policy: In the event that we’re unable to provide 40 suggestions for improvements we’ll still complete the audit and leave it up to you if you want a refund.
Lead time: A typical full site audit takes around 17-25 work days - depending on time of year, project scope and auditor availability.
Confidential: All client-specific audits and UX scorecards are strictly confidential; they are not included in Baymard’s public benchmark databases or shared with anyone else (NDA is possible).
Unbiased: As Baymard does not offer any kind of design or development services or sell e-commerce technology, the UX audit will always be a completely unbiased analysis of your site, and not an indirect “sales pitch” for other services. At Baymard our specialization is the UX audit.
What Our Clients Say About the UX Audit
“Thank you, this was really insightful!”
“I found the UX audit a very comprehensive evaluation, with clear reports and actionable recommendations. Baymard's commitment to excellence in user experience shines through its thorough approach!”
“Thanks for everything. The audit was extremely useful, I think we have gained valuable insight.”
“The Baymard team has been a delight to work with on the JohnLewis digital platform audit. They responded to the brief very well, have been very accessible for ongoing clarification and queries and Rebecca was excellent in the recent team share, articulately presenting findings in an engaging walk-through with the wider team which will really support driving engagement and a robust response. Many thanks for all the effort and focus folks.”
“The recommendations in our audit were awesome - well prioritized, actionable and helped us focus on what to optimize. This audit, along with the e-Commerce Reports & Benchmark Databases, are my go-to resources for thorough, insightful information. Thank you!”
“Baymard produces some of the most relevant and actionable user experience research available. They really understand the needs of UX and Product Management professionals, and their deep experience in the eCommerce field allows them to offer sophisticated, nuanced insights.”
“Thanks again for the great work on our checkout project. Our whole group found it incredibly insightful. We’re applying the suggestions you provided to our new checkout design which launches at the end of the month! One of my colleagues was also interested in your group’s competitive expertise with regard to responsive web and native apps.”
“I just wanted to take a minute to thank you for the amazing work on this audit. You should know that this has been very well received internally and there’s a lot of excitement around adopting the ideas you have shared.”
“We found the audits extremely helpful and validated a number of changes we have been wanting to make or are in the process of making, so thank again for all the great insights.”
“This was indeed very helpful guidance and a very well-documented roadmap for us to fix, validate, organize, collectively understand and continually improve our ecommerce foundation.”
“I can confirm that the list was fully implemented. Every time we put up a change we either A/B test or we watch it very closely to determine that it’s doing better and not the opposite. So I can confirm that these fixes have improved our checkout. Thanks for everything.”
“Thank you for the UX audit presentation, it was FANTASTIC. People here are quite pleased and amazed by the amount of work that was put into this.”
“Thank you very much for the 7 usability audits of our country-specific sites. The audits have provided us with specific and actionable advice, allowed us to prioritize development resources, and enabled us to compare UX performance between the 7 different country-specific sites, and against State of the Art implementations. The audit itself is done really professionally, and the recommendations contain actionable and insightful information.”
“Intelligent, consumer-focused insights that are clear and actionable. The team in the room really loved the way the Baymard Institute highlighted the optimizations in the various user experience elements (copy, layout, design, calls-to-action…), from the perspective of consumer struggles. Baymard’s Usability research really complements our other existing research tools.”
“We’ve received some awesome feedback from our Merchant Success team as well as our merchants about all of the UX Audits we’ve had thus far with Baymard. Thank you so much to you and your team for all of your hard work. The pilot with Baymard has been going fantastic and I’m really excited with all that we’re learning! You have an amazing platform, team and super helpful data base for us to work with.”
“We have recently tested some of your recommendations for the Avast checkout and got some great wins!”
“I’m reviewing the report this morning and I am delighted. The recommendations are detailed and our resulting actions are clear. I’m excited to share this with the rest of the team!”
“We are very excited to finally proceed with the UX improvements, and I truly believe your audit report will be super helpful to put us ahead of the wave. If you ever need a reference, please do not hesitate to share my contact.”
“The walkthrough today was great. The report was very, very well done and loaded with great opportunities for us to improve our business. I wanted to again express my appreciation for working with us on such a condensed time frame last month. You and your team have been amazing partners to us and we very much appreciate the work, expertise and partnership.”
“Baymard has been a great resource in helping us improve the customer experience. We are continually applying these best practices to our sites.”
“Thank you. This was an excellent piece of work: professional, thorough, and actionable for the team. We’re very happy with the work Baymard has done for us.”
“I wanted to begin by saying how incredibly impressed I have been with the degree/depth of content shared on UX/UI best practices for eCommerce experiences. This has by far been one of the most valuable workshops I have ever attended in my professional career.”
“We like what we are reviewing from the audit - great analysis and feedback.”
“I’m an avid user of your reports and recommendations. I have leveraged your articles and findings throughout my career in B2B, B2C, and hospitality.”
“We implemented this [1 of the 15 audit suggestions] and since then we’ve had a 20% increase in warranties added and a pretty healthy average order increase because of that. That was a great suggestion, it hit our bottom line immediately.”
“Let me say that it was exceptionally well done, and we are super excited to implement every one of the recommendations there. Everything you said has usually been a case of discussion in the past, but having them recommended in a deck like this will allow us to move forward.”
“Within a very short time Baymard Institute provided 15 clear, useful improvement suggestions for our checkout process. We intend to implement all of them. It’s easy to find companies that offer website improvement suggestions. But, most companies don’t do their homework and don’t provide specific examples of how best to make the improvements. With Baymard Institute, the checkout process suggestions they made were intuitive, specific, and actionable. I highly recommend their audit service.”
“Wow, this is great! Just reviewed it with the team. It’s a huge help and we’re excited to fix these issues.”
“We have worked with a number of third party companies before on various projects/audits, and I can certainly say that working with Baymard was not only a pleasure; but you delivered on time; to the level of depth we wanted; addressing important issues; and answering all our questions; and you did all this for a great price. A big THANK YOU on behalf of N11.”
“Wanted to thank you again for the checkout audit and walking us through the process. It was super helpful and we can’t wait to apply the changes to our checkout for a better user experience.”
“A great presentation, and the results were very eye-opening. It’s really helpful.”
“Given the tricky science of conversion rate optimization, it is great to know that you are dealing with professionals whose advice is based on solid research. It was a pleasure collaborating with the Baymard team.”
“Baymard recently did a UX audit of our new e-commerce Website. We were very pleased with the results. The report and live review of the findings validated our approach to user experience, and also, we learned a lot about best practices for e-commerce UX. We believe Baymard’s work will help us increase revenue and user satisfaction.”
“I just wanted to thank you guys for all of the time that you’ve put into this, and for a great presentation. We don’t have anyone at the company that has formal UX/UI experience, so being able to tap into Baymard’s resources/expertise is an immediate win for us. Some of the things you pointed out, we’ve already identified as areas for improvement (which was validating), but a lot of the recommendations are things that we hadn’t identified and are for the most part immediately actionable.”
“I’m very impressed! Not about our site’s performance, quite the opposite, but about your work. Very detailed and packed with great and tangible advice. This was exactly what I dreamt about, but sometimes you just have to be careful dreaming.”
“A big thanks to you and the Baymard team for such an informative and valuable session. The Ace Hardware team truly appreciated the Baymard teams feedback, diligence and the overall presentation. We are looking forward to using the excellent information provided to improve the acehardware.com user journey.”
“Thanks for this audit and your good work. This was exactly what I was aiming for. Also thanks for the very, very professional presentation, and answering all our countless questions. Very good work.”
“First off, thank you. This was the most engrossed I’ve ever been in a 2-hour meeting. This [audit presentation] was incredibly insightful and very helpful. Many, many thanks.”
“We are very excited to finally proceed with the UX improvements, and I truly believe your audit report will be super helpful to put us ahead of the wave. If you ever need a reference, please do not hesitate to share my contact.”
“This was…mind-blowing. We’ve been having conversations on the side as you’ve been presenting the audit findings. There’s so much to do!”
“Thank you very much for your time and the presentation. It was super useful, comprehensive and most importantly very concrete, so that we know exactly what to do next. We will definitely recommend you to other divisions within Bosch.”
“This is awesome so far. Everyone wants to know what's going on – you just got everyone's attention here. Everything that you've called out is definitely eye-opening for us over here.”
“[Wanted to] say thanks, because we had a meeting yesterday everyone’s really excited about this. It’s really got everyone motivated and interested in what we’re going to tackle next so it’s been really invaluable, I think.”
“This has been fantastic: really good recommendations, really comprehensive.”
“Very thorough and professional UX review of our website, based on an extensive amount of previous UX research insights within the industry, and specifically targeted to our needs. We received both critical and, most importantly, constructive feedback, along with actionable, prioritized suggestions and best-practice examples. This will allow us to address the areas of improvement and significantly help ameliorate the experience users have on our website, which in turn is expected to drive conversion rates and reduce the number of customer service requests. We can highly recommend Baymard's UX audit.”
“This UX audit has been very helpful, not just for our design and product teams, but even for the UX research team, because we can reference back to the audit, either in the design of a user research session or when we analyze findings. Thank you very much; this has been incredibly valuable.”
“I thought it was great. A lot of it is things that we've either known or called out to each other in the past, but the important part is putting a weight on it, or a score on it. To then actually have a true impact of how much each issue is hurting. It's nice to see some implementations that are good, too. Thank you so much.”
“Fantastic delivery and very clear breakdown of findings.”
“The Baymard UX audit has been a revelation for our organisation and will likely become a vital tool in our process moving forward.”
“Clear, concise, actionable, data-driven insights!”
“Working with Baymard for our UX audit was an exceptional experience from start to finish. Their attention to detail, depth of analysis, and clear communication throughout the process truly exceeded our expectations. The insights they provided were not only actionable but profoundly insightful. I highly recommend Baymard for their expertise, professionalism, and commitment to elevating user experiences.”
“Baymard's audit services give us a detailed view of usability improvements across our entire site. This is so much more comprehensive than running individual usability studies.”
“Having Baymard is like having access to a magical UX super power. I can't believe how helpful and easy to use it is, given the vast array of tools and information they provide!”
“The audit opened our eyes once again, as we are often blind to our own operations. The comparison with competitors' best practices was particularly helpful.”