SUPPER: High-End Food Delivery Connecting Merchants, Consumers, and Drivers

Background

SUPPER was at a UX Maturity of level 2.

No UXR
No Component Library and Design System and documentation
No legacy or existing designs to refer to
Not customer focused
Little to no data analytics

The engineering team lacked understanding on how visual design affected usability and they initially did not think the products required improving.

Approach

Through weekly meeting with developers, 1:1 conversations with stakeholders. I helped prioritise components and communicate naming conventions to developers.

I focused on research on colour psychology, implementing findings and documentation on how to use components whilst another designer helped to create the component variables.

Outcome

Once components were clearly defined, developers and QA engineers were no longer frustrated and confused. They asked me less questions and they gained greater belief in what they were building were correct, I no longer needed to do design quality check and less tickets were raised.

84%
Developer's time saved

My Role

Daily responsibilities
Involved tasks found across roles of Product Owner, Product Manager, Product Designer, UX/UI, and User Researcher.

Experienced

Working in-person and remotely with an engineering team change.

Gained
Skills in managing up, collaborating at all levels, and learning from a broad team.

What I enjoyed
Autonomy, creative freedom to discover and work cross-functional work with customer services, design, engineering, marketing, data analysis, and business.
My work journey summarised in 4 points:
I started as their First Product Designer hire
Established the function of design at the company
Became Lead Designer for all four products
Managed and prioritised the product backlog

The Team I Worked With

Ian Warner
CTO (2023)
Eduard Lazar
CTO (2022)
Peter Georgiou
CEO
Arabella Wentworth Waites
Head of Marketing
Catherine Levins
Head of Partnerships
Christian Black
Head of Sales, Corporate
Hossein Ojaghi.
Senior Frontend Developer
Ion Olaru
Flutter Developer
Vladimir Baumgartner
Software Engineer
Branimir Bibic
Lead QA Engineer
Vukaskin
Backend teamlead & roftware engineer
Alireza
Product Designer
Marko Kantardzic
Junior Flutter Developer
Hesam Heini
Full Stack Developer

Problem

Inconsistent & Fragmented Products

hOW THIS AFFECTED CUSTOMERS & Customer support

Customer support overwhelmed by volume of calls asking for help to make or cancel an order.

hOW THIS AFFECTED restaurant partners support team

Dealing with daily calls from restaurants

62% of restaurant partners' staff struggled to read what food orders were received on the handheld POS device SUPPER Restaurant app and were unclear each button meant.

Restaurant support staff were spending significant time everyday with restaurant staff to resolve issue, so they worked over time everyday to catch up with high priority tasks.

Impact on Engineering and business

Increased costs due to unnecessary expenses and waste

Multiple variations of icons, font, colours and components created at every sprint, at times inaccessible.
No single source of truth.
Introduction of new bugs in every production, creating more technical debt.
Slow development, QA and business growth.
Low morale and blaming culture.
hOW THIS AFFECTED restaurant partners support team

Dealing with daily calls from restaurants

62% of restaurant partners' staff struggled to read what food orders were received on the handheld POS device SUPPER Restaurant app and were unclear each button meant.

Restaurant support staff were spending significant time everyday with restaurant staff to resolve issues, so they worked over time everyday to catch up with high priority tasks.

hOW THIS AFFECTED restaurant partners support team

Dealing with daily calls from restaurants

62% of restaurant partners' staff struggled to read what food orders were received on the handheld POS device SUPPER Restaurant app and were unclear each button meant.

Restaurant support staff were spending significant time everyday with restaurant staff to resolve issue, so they worked over time everyday to catch up with high priority tasks.

Colour theory in BRANDING, FOOD & user Research

Goal : Improve usability and brand appeal

Transitioning from Interior Design, I studied color theory to understand its impact on perceptions and consumer behavior.

I presented findings with user data and competitor analysis to stakeholders, showcasing my customer-centric approach and alignment with business goals.

Through storytelling, I highlighted that SUPPER's brand lacked the luxury appeal needed to match partner restaurants and customers expectations, emphasising how high-quality visual design boosts trust and usability.

As a result, stakeholders understood the importance for me to create brand guidelines and a design system. I worked closely with the CTO to prioritise key components we could improve. Internally adopting these guidelines improved workflows between marketing, engineering, and product. SUPPER saw reduced cancelled food orders.

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How I created the Design System

Me and the engineering team simplified the UI by:

Refactoring selected code
APAC accessible, standardised colour combinations, future-proofing all products for (WCAG) 3.0 guidelines.
Reduce typefaces from 5 to 1 type
This increased page loading speed by 24%.

Light and dark mode

Customer App
5 out of 10 customers found it difficult to view menus in dark mode.

Restaurant App
60% of waitresses and managers found dark scheme and 12px typeface hard to read in dim lit restaurant interiors. A light scheme was created and tested, resulting in positive feedback and improved usability.

Socialising the new Design System cross-functionally

Collaborated with marketing to improve E-mails & Push Notifications
We agreed on a cohesive tone for the copy, making it short, simple, and clear. This reduced customer frustration and lowered the number of customer service inquiries.

Engaged stakeholders
In elements which were relevant to their concerns, facilitating smoother adoption.

Simplify all image assets using 1 aspect ratio instead of 3 to:

  • reduce card height to increase number of menu items visible
  • reduce scroll fatigue
  • reduce development time (considering we only had 5 developers and 1 QA)

The Design System Was Applied To

B2C customer web & app
B2B restaurant app
Internal customer management website
Marketing and communication to customers
Content design incl. UX Copy, language and tone
Preview of component library - light colour scheme
Preview of component library - light colour scheme

Results

Cohesive, legible design helped to convert, engage,
and retain more users on website and app.
54%
Reactivation of previously lapsed customers
+30 secs
Increased customers engagement time by 25% on the restaurants menu pages.

Challenges & Solutions

Engineers Unaware of Usability

Developers were unaware as to how visual design affected usability and believed no improvements were needed. To build empathy, I shared key Hotjar recordings showing customer frustration and walked them through user stories, helping them understand my UI choices. While they recognized the need for improvements, they were unsure of their ability to focus on visual detail. To ensure user-friendly releases, we implemented a process to test the product and provide feedback to the QA Engineers prior to releases. This process was removed when a second engineer team joined.

Content Management Required Improving

Survey data showed that food menus with images increased users' to add items to their carts. Items without images were often ignored unless the user was already familiar with the menu. Therefore, images were essential for users to identify both familiar and new items.

To improve the experience, we organised photoshoots for missing menu items, I created a photography brief and art direction to ensure consistent, high-quality images informed and met customer expectations.

SUPPER

Product Designer 2022 - 2023.
Led design and managed content, started a mobile and website component library, designed food packaging.

SUPPER

Product Designer 2022 - 2023.
Led design and managed content, started a mobile and website component library, designed food packaging.