Turn fans into superfans
A marketing website that doesn’t sell anything, yet still drives sales.
MY ROLE:
- UX Lead
- Strategy Lead
- Product Lead
CHALLENGE
How do you turn fans into superfans?
INSIGHT
People need help unleashing their inner superfan.
SOLVE
A website that helps you cook like the ranch person you already are.
IMPACT
300% increase in revenue driven by the website.
Double the impact of a website that doesn’t sell anything.
Hidden Valley’s most powerful marketing asset was a website that sold nothing.
People dip, dunk, drizzle and drink ranch every single day. As the brand evolved, it saw how much of the business those fans really drove.
A website that already delivers
HiddenValleyRanch.com receives over 30 million visitors a year. About 80% of those visitors come to explore the site’s 700+ recipes. Each website visit has been statistically tied to an increase in purchasing behavior.
Beyond dipping
Ranch moved beyond the veggie tray a long time ago. Superfans use it as a condiment, a marinade, and an ingredient in the meals they cook every week. The opportunity was to meet people everywhere ranch already shows up, not just at the dip bowl.
An ambitious goal
Hidden Valley wanted to double the website’s impact on purchase behavior. That meant treating a site with no cart and no checkout as a real sales channel, and measuring it like one.
People need help unleashing their inner superfan
Hidden Valley had a secret weapon. Superfans didn’t just like the product, they felt it was part of who they were. Their friends knew them as “The Ranch Person” and ordered it for them before they showed up to a restaurant.
You can’t promote someone into feeling that way. But you can help a fan get there, by making it easier to do the thing superfans already do.
“You either love it, or you really love it.” — Hidden Valley Ranch
From recipe library to cooking companion
Every feature traced back to the same idea: help a fan do what superfans already do.
01 — PERSONALIZATION
A site that knows who you are
“Cynthia, let’s cook.” The site greets you by name and adapts to what you actually make. A recipe library serves everyone the same thing. A companion learns.
02 — DISCOVERY
Built for the moment you decide what’s for dinner
We mapped how our target persona actually plans and cooks a weeknight meal, and marked the moments of truth where the site could genuinely help. Filters and sorting were built around real constraints: time, what’s already in the fridge, and who’s eating.
03 — COLLECTIONS
Collections organized around real life, not ingredients
Nobody goes looking for “dressing-based recipes.” They go looking for something the kids will actually eat. Collections were built around the situations people cook in — picky eaters, lunchboxes, game day — so the site answers the question people are really asking.
04 — RANGE
Ranch as an ingredient, not a condiment
Superfans had already moved past the veggie tray. The recipe experience followed them there, treating ranch as a marinade, a base, and an ingredient in the meals they cook every week.
05 — FOUNDATIONS
Foundational components built to support the changes to come
An atomic design system underneath: styles and color drawn from brand guidelines, atoms composed into molecules, molecules into modules reused across the site. Not just a faster way to design, but a consistent experience for users and a foundation for everything that came after.
See other work
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300%
increase in revenue generated by the website
The goal was to double it.
30M
VISITORS A YEAR
700+
RECIPES
0
THINGS THE SITE SELLS
What I owned
Three roles across one program. The research, the strategy and the product decisions sat with the same person — so what we learned in research went straight into what we built.
UX Lead
Ran the research behind the superfan insight — personas, user journeys, and the moments of truth where the site could actually change behavior.
Strategy Lead
Tied website behavior to purchase behavior, and made the case for treating 30 million annual visits as a measurable sales channel.
Product Lead
Turned the research into a prioritized feature set, and the component system that let the site keep evolving after launch.
1/2
Saul is a fantastic partner on so many levels. Not only is he smart, versatile and pro-active, he has the ability to see things clearly when others are stymied by project chaos. He is able to communicate strategic ideas in a positive and simple manner which allows for a more efficient collaboration process.
– Anna Rodrigues, Group Project Manager, Electro Creative Workshop
Let's talk
Interested in working together? Have a question? Drop me a note.