The now defunct Tastebook cooking / recipe site was used as a marketing vertical to help promote Random House cookbook publications and their authors. The site allowed users to browse, share and save recipes from cooks and authors as well as by other members of the Tastebook community. One of the big site features was the ability to create customized physical cookbooks on-demand from a user's recipe collection.

The folks from NYT Cooking were looking for ways to maximize the value of their content and approached us to explore the possibilities of white labeling a site to offer their own users a custom cookbook from their NYT Cooking recipes. I was charged with working on the initial plans of what that might look like. Here you can see my mapping of the user flow as it transitioned from NYT Cooking to Tastebook.

There were major issues with how user data flowed from NYT Cooking to Tastebook and then back again. There were also issues regarding customer checkout as well as temporarily maintaining and then purging user data. Also, how do we secure and maintain the login credentials as the user passes from one system to the other in a, hopefully, seamless experience?

Here's my attempt to map the various flows of data as it passes through different proprietary systems.

Here's a very detailed wire of the checkout process.

Here's some of the finished screens of the user flow.

Top-left to right: A NYT Cooking user's collection for Fish recipes. The UI that allows the user to select, delete, and arrange which recipes to include in the cookbook.

Bottom-left to right: The UI to select and customize your cookbook cover. The live preview modal that allows the user to flip through a virtual version of their cookbook before submitting.

As many of these preliminary explorations go, the project was sidelined as the NYT Cooking team got consumed by the app's official release and then Tastebook was transitioned to a more traditional editorial content site rebranded as Taste. I saw that NYT Cooking later did offer custom cookbooks for a trial period.