Making a big and bold impression in a busy space

Lunchbox excelled at partnering far-out marketing initiatives with top shelf designs in repeatedly successful attempts to enhance brand awareness. As Design Director I oversaw the Brand, Marketing and Product design teams, with the express goal to maintain, build and further our already established visual language.

The food ordering marketplace is not only saturated but dominated by larger companies with infinitely more resources. Lunchbox started as a company wanting to give control - and profits - back to restaurants, so the challenge was to provide a unique design that accomodated the brand but also worked for SMB and Enterprise clients alike.

As Design Director, one of my duties was the overseeing the product design team: this was largely because the original team failed with a 2.0 product launch that was universally disliked by our customers. I reformed the team and the design process to help launch a 2.1 product that replaced the failed 2.0.

Our clients were incredibly happy with the improved designs, which helped increase sales by 30% across all Lunchbox brands. Not only were first-party sales via Lunchbox 3x more profitable than third-party orders, but a 42% faster checkout speed also helped contribute to client stickiness.

Where I stepped in

Prior to this, my role had been Director of Design overseeing our brand and marketing teams. Given my client experience, I could easily see the answer to our problem. I summarized the painpoints, created a platform wide information architecture table and then isolated each individual flow to enhance.

This was done three times over, the first was our 1.0 Platform, then our 2.0 and finally the suggested 2.1. Here we identifed issues, trimmed the fat and isolated the core experience.

I then isolated core flows where our customers experienced the most grief. In this case it was the checkout experience and the database preference engine.

Conveniently I had already begun working on some UI redesigns as part of our product marketing arm. So I refined based on my research and objectives, then prototyed the full flow from start to finish; all the while refining and analyzing.

The answer: templates and in-app marketing

Myself and the Chief Engineer, Cem Bego, came up with a template concept that catered to a wide variety of our clients - including catering! The answer was a series of templates that better accommodated their brands and that were all linked to our API database.

The Tiger Template was our new polished UI that had all the bells and whistles of our competitors, but a fully unique and customizable UI. Broken down into H1, H2, H3 etc categories and fully adaptable to the brand.

This was our attempt at catering to the smaller SMB locations and to differentiate ourselves from our competitors. Acting more like a proof of concept for more alternative templates.

Our 1.0 flagship (which people did like) just reskinned and managed better on the backend. We dubbed it the o.g.