Going for Seconds on Homepage Design: Q&A with Amanda Hesser of Food52

Rituals remind us why we live and love.

Rituals are also addictions. If noon rolls around and I haven’t hit my bookmarks, I start to get shaky and pale.

The core four in my morning digital dose are: the New York Times, Mediabistro, Daily Beast, Food52. (OK, I lied, People.com is a fifth. Hey, I work on a health magazine with celebrity covers. I really do need to know that Demi is having a breakdown right now.)

One day last fall, school-dropoff and work events conspired and I didn’t get online until late. New York Times, Mediabistro, Daily Beast, check. Food52? Hold on. 

It had changed. It was … new. Redesigned, top to bottom. Nothing was where it used to be. The site’s simplicity had given way to lots of content boxes that went down, down, down and a Rembrandt-like color palette. Everywhere you looked, the site telegraphed who was reading what recipe—at that very second. It was exciting and it was still elegant, but it was a tiny bit scary. I missed the serenity.

Do you know Food52? It’s a crowdsourced food website—that gets 500K uniques per month—co-founded by a writer I’ve long followed, Amanda Hesser. (I’m using “followed” in the archaic sense of the word, pre-Twitter.) Hesser, the former food editor of the Sunday New York Times Magazine and the editor of The Essential New York Times Cookbook, puts words and food together in a way that the great writer I most love (after Didion), M. F. K. Fisher, would solidly approve.

Launched in 2009, Food52 helped pioneer the creative possibilities of community online. The site posts one contest each week (“Your Best Holiday Roast Recipe,” “Your Best Citrus Recipe”). Home cooks race to submit entries, the Food52 team tests, users vote, and a winner is crowned. At the end of the year, Amanda and her cofounder, Merrill Stubbs, a Le Cordon Bleu-trained cook and food writer, publish all 52 recipes in a cookbook. .

So, imagine the disorientation when I logged on and couldn’t find any of the contest winners I’d been whipping up. I soon got used to it, of course. Even grew to love it. But many users didn’t and complained loudly. And often. Hesser responded to a good many of them, with kindness, patience, interest, and firmness. Then, a month or so ago, she started peppering her answers with references to an upcoming design tweak. Change, again! No surprise. When it comes to websites, launching is often relaunching. But I was curious, how far would Food52 take crowdsourcing when it came to the design of the site itself?

Here’s where journalism is the greatest job on earth. You get to call up interesting people who care deeply about the same things you do and just ask.

Hesser was kind enough to answer my questions over the phone from her Brooklyn home, fatefully, a week before Food52 launched its second homepage go-around.

Q: What was your goal in first overhauling Food52 last October?

A. We had been thinking about it for a really long time because the original site was a blog format, so content would fall off the homepage pretty quickly. So we reorganized it. It was actually not that different in terms of the actual content, it’s just the way it’s presented.

 

We wanted to create a doormat, meaning the homepage, that really had a lot more content and a lot more of the things that we do right there on the surface for you. Because we were actually doing a lot different things, but in our old homepage, you wouldn’t necessarily know that. We wanted you to get to the site and have it be more of a warm embrace rather than well, you figure it out.

 

 

Q: And what did you take away from the flood of tsk-tsking comments you got from Food52ers—some of which were downright hostile?

 

A. People don’t like change, so we expected some resistance. And a number of people who complained about our redesign originally came around to some aspect of what we had done. But we believe deeply in collaboration and that we actually had redesigned the homepage based on comments that had been made for the past year.

 

But we also feel like we need to lead people to new ways of thinking. That is part of what we do. Our whole premise is that it is crowdsourcing but it’s also curation, and I think that curation is the leading part.

 

Ultimately, though, we weren’t happy with the homepage either. So that’s why we are changing it again.

 

Q: What surprised you most about the metrics following your redesign?

A. Beyond the redesign itself, we had technical issues when we relaunched that were really difficult and thorny, which we didn’t anticipate. And, yet, in spite of all of that, all of our engagement numbers—time on site and page views per visit—doubled.

 

People were spending more time on the site, they were going to more pages, they were exploring more and they continued to. Our goal was to increase engagement and to get people who were coming through a link not just to look at that recipe, but to discover a new place and really poke around. And that seems to be working. Also, people are sharing more. We improved the way our sharing tools were positioned.

 

Q: Fast forward to now. This past week, on Feb. 2, you rolled out your new homepage. What are its top changes and why?

A. To make it easier for people to quickly see all of the latest content, and for people who are new to the site to find ways to get involved in the community. Our goals are simply for the user experience to be more seamless. We do a lot of different things on the site, and we want people to see this as a positive thing, not as a source of confusion.

 

Q: What did you lose on the homepage to make it more focused?

A. We’re not really losing anything, we’re just reorganizing it. We’re actually adding a few things, like comment counts where they don’t currently exist and more breadcrumbs for people to follow to get involved on the site.

 

Q: Which other sites did you look to for design inspiration?

A. Svpply. Good. 101 Cookbooks. Kickstarter.

 

Q: What is the biggest “wrong turn” you think you took along the way to the new homepage?

A. We used too much black in the first version—our spirit is more gray, and gray lets our photography do the talking, as it should.

 

Q: Crowdsourcing is at the heart of your site, but you’ve given it an edge by building in seniority and curation. The more recipes users post, the more pieces are filled in the pie icon that travels with their handle. That was new in the first redesign—and useful. Will you keep it as-is?

 

A. We wanted you to have a sense, especially if you were new to the site, of who can you trust? Who is well-regarded, who is very active? It’s not exactly the most scientific system, but we’re going to make it more granular over the next couple of months.

 

It’s one of those tricky things: how to come up with a formula. We wanted to reward people for pure activity—enthusiasm, really—and we had to find ways to delineate what is quality participation versus just activity. Also we didn’t want people to game the system. We wanted it to be a really helpful guide. That’s something we’re going to have to keep tweaking, but it seems to work so far.

 

Q: You released your holiday cookbook as an app, “Food 52: Holiday Recipe & Survival Guide,” for $9.99. Is this the future for your crowd-sourced recipe-winning compilations: apps, not print?

A. It may be—we’re not sure. We’ll definitely do more apps. We love books and may want to work on more books, but right now we’re busy with a bunch of projects, so we’ll have to see where we’re at in a few months.

 

Q: With your original technique videos, what approaches have you found get the most traffic and engagement?

A. Keep them short. Invite guests. Don’t edit out the mistakes or chit-chat—that stuff makes them more fun and real. The videos with the most traffic tend to focus on a technique or trick that’s new to people—like smashing garlic with a meat pounder. Nothing crazy but the kind of thing that most home cooks haven’t tried.

Q: What’s the next big thing for Food52?

A. We want to help home cooks everywhere with our Food52 Hotline—everyone has food and cooking questions, and our community is at the ready to help them out. Think Butterball Turkey Helpline for the 21st century.

 

So, hunting for a recipe? Don’t know how to truss a chicken? Plain-old hungry? Start your search on Food52’s fresh-out-of-the-oven homepage. It’s cleaner, gentler, and yes, while it’s mostly white, there is more gray, less black. In one of the 103 comments (as of this posting), Food52 member mrathmel expresses the crowdsourced sigh of relief: “Great re-design. I had actually avoided using your site more because I had so much trouble with it. The new design seems to be just right. Thank you!”

[Image: mil8]