Our new Takeaway service launched 8 months prior. The service was an expansion from just supermarkets into restaurants, which meant users could buy discounted meals on the app and pick them up in the store or restaurant.
While we saw a big uptick in downloads and weekly active users from 400 to 2000, we weren’t getting enough sales.
Our mission was to improve the customer experience so that our users were habitually using the app, and buying more takeaway meals.
An expansion from grocery products into restaurants and catering meant users could now pay for and reserve some items within the app, but not others.
We needed to clearly identify and differentiate between:
Focus group found agreement among users that the stores-based architecture of our app was cumbersome and inconvenient to navigate.
“There’s too much clicking back and forth navigating the grocery products.” - Tarkan, User
“Too many categories that make me feel confused. I like to browse through many items and get inspired, rather than the disrupting flow of different categories.” - Focus group participant
Users cared about the environmental mission of the product, and wanted to see more. We weren’t doing enough to highlight our unique position as not just an app for deals, but something good for the planet too.
A cross-functional group, of nine people, with at least one representative from each department of the business.
We had sales, marketing, operations, C-suite executives, development, and management present for three days of focused brainstorming and ultra productive designing.
By the end, we had the seeds for what became a brand new app, with a new user experience and new branding. Not only that, we got the whole team in agreement and excited about the new direction.
I lead the team through what we knew and everyone gave their input to the different challenges we were facing.
Every team member comes with their own goals and biases in day to day operations, so this is a good way to bring everyone together towards a shared goal.
We each framed the goals, challenges and risks as opportunities. We voted on important topics and grouped similar themes.
After much brainstorming, structured discussions, voting, and grouping of themes, one thing was clear — we had a hypothesis.
By putting products on the home screen, we would show users more of what they want and therefore increase sales and honour our mission of saving more food waste.
We’ll know this to be true when:
We each took our turn framing the opportunities into one happy path. What did everything we’d discussed and agreed on look like for our user?
First we brainstormed individual user journeys, then combined the best parts of each into one. They fit nicely into our theme of activate, locate, act:
To get into the mindset, we used a deck of design inspiration we’d been gathering over the past months, and spent some time reviewing all of the information we had to formulate our ideas.
First, we set a timer and roughly sketched our ideas, loosely defining what the user journey we’d defined the day before would look like.
Next, we set a timer for 8 minutes to do crazy 8s — you design 8 screens in 8 minutes.
Finally, everyone had 20 minutes to create a final concept, completed with a theme name. First we dot-voted on the interesting designs, before presenting our concepts. Our CPO had the final super votes on the most impactful parts.
Day two came to a close with a final concept storyboard ready for prototyping.
We cut and pasted the best parts of each concept into one user flow to fit the one we’d mapped out the day before. From here I could create a first wireframe to test with users and gauge response.
Day three was a solo adventure, where I dove into Figma and brought our storyboard to life.
I wrote a test script to gauge user response not only to the user experience but the whole campaign and concept. We wanted to test the whole customer journey and reaction to the new brand name as well.
The response from testers was positive:
... but we still had some areas to improve:
Once we were confident with the UX, I finally got my hands on the branding identity from our external agency.
It was vibrant, youthful, and bold. Exactly what we needed to bring this interactive experience to life.
I enlisted some help from our graphic and motion designer, and we bounced ideas back and forth for a few days.
We tried, and failed. Quite a lot.
We introduced new colours to offset the lurid, eyeball-scorching neons, and things slowly started to come together. We played with offsetting the illustrations for a more edgy, youthful look.
As I worked on styling the design system, our motion designer animated the Taste and Waste icons, a crucial interaction in our new gamified experience.
I wanted the animations to be fun, while helping us to communicate our message about the impacts of food waste.
It was a huge team effort that required good communication and juggling, as I worked on building out the design system and UI, the developers started building the app.
I would mark user flows and screens that were ready for development and deliver assets on a daily basis. Oftentimes, the flutter developer and I were working together to perfect components on the go.
Preliminary testing showed positive results with:
We had many plans to further improve the foundations we’d set with:
We also rebranded our merchant dashboard and added several key features to help alleviate any time and resource pressure from them:
Plans were underway to expand and launch Takeaway in Estonia and France.
Our tech team worked closely with Carrefour to integrate their stock into our app. We were able to show live stock availability and added some more detailed product nutrition data.
I made a separate home screen for Carrefour and hid a few features as we didn’t yet have our Takeaway service available in France at the time.
The app was handed over in October 2023.
This was a huge team collaboration. Luckily, this was a great and talented team, many of whom I’d worked with for up to two years at this point.
Sadly, we endured many team and priority changes which made delivery more drawn out than necessary. I learned a lot about leadership, teamwork, and priorities along the way.
On the other hand, we had a lot of new investments, partners, and projects because of our amazing work.
After 2 years working with Shannon at F4A, I can highly recommend her. Time and again, she navigated ambiguous requirements and translated vague ideas into fully functional and lickable user experiences. She is a strong advocate for user needs while understanding the technical implications and business impact of her design decisions.
Her meticulous attention to detail can be appreciated by both design and engineering during development I look forward to collaborating again in the future.
I highly recommend Shannon Lake for any UX design. Shannon is an exceptional and creative UX designer with a strong passion for innovation. Her proactive approach ensures that her design projects are delivered on time and exceed expectations.
Shannon deeply understands the entire product management lifecycle, from ideation to implementation, making her an invaluable asset to the product team. With high proficiency in Figma and Flutterflow, Shannon consistently delivers polished and user-friendly designs. She has an outstanding dedication to excellence and ability to drive projects forward.
It has been a very good team moment. The sprint was very well prepared - bravo Shannon (Game master!) and Adam for the control and management (Time master!).
I enjoyed the debates and ideation. The collaboration in a federated model worked well - planting and harvesting ideas together from different disciplines.
Shannon was my friend before she became my colleague and after our experience working together, I have come to admire her even more. A natural leader, kind sharing knowledge, integrates people and values the constant development of all.
She is a dedicated professional who knows how to clearly defend her ideas. I'm grateful to have shared the days with her, it will be an inspiration to me.
I worked with Shannon for two years on many different projects. During that period not only was she full of creative energy and ideas, but she had amazing problem solving ability and was always up for some brainstorming.
I mainly worked on branding and marketing design, but whenever I needed to jump into unfamiliar territory like Figma or Jira, Shannon helped make my workflow easy because she organises and manages assets like a pro ninja.
Shannon Lake
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