Like most industries, the fast food industry is currently going through a digital transformation and creating world-class app-driven customer experiences. Now, as a consequent of the digital paradigm shift caused by COVID-19, Chicken Express is adapting with enhanced delivery and take-out options.

The key features of the app are a smart food ordering experience and efficient food delivery. To achieve this, we adopted a user interface that promotes healthy meal choices, a customer reward system, an agile geolocation API, an intuitive user interface that makes food ordering easy and convenient for the customers and a simple payment process.

One of the prevailing problems fast food customers face is getting their orders mishandled and delivered late. Most in-store fast food restaurants in Nigeria still use the old method of handwritten notes in taking orders. Secondly, many people are becoming self conscious of the foods they eat and as a result are increasingly being particular about the nutritional content of their meals. There is also the problem of terrible food delivery experience.

Expanding digital touchpoints and streamlining online strategies are no longer a bonus for restaurants, but a necessity – especially with the major shifts that impact dining experiences amid the urge for social distancing and shelter-in-place practices following the pandemic.

A qualitative research was carried out on 15 users between the ages of 21 and 50 with the sole purpose of prioritizing the users by putting them front and center. The research helped answer pressing questions such as:

Some of the questions asked were

We were able to gather some useful information on the general opinion of customers about their fast food restaurant experience. Through the insights gathered, a holistic view of the problems facing fast food in Nigeria was uncovered. Essentially, there seem to be an absence of a customer-facing experience. Chicken Express seeks to stand out from the crowd thereby, developing a more customer centric experience that truly represents the brand’s offering.Insights from the interview were:

The iteration stage involved the decision of what approach to take in the design process. The team and I looked into several use cases and best practises and a couple of brands were analyzed. Notable among which were Starbucks, McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A. We figured there was no need reinventing the wheel rather we could leverage on the successes of these brands.After series of sprints and meetings, we were able to match up our findings from the user interviews with the analysis made on these successful brands. The areas we zeroed in on are:

Guided by our research, I was able to derive a structure for the user flow and wireframes. Right off the bat, I thought the onboarding process should give guests a sneak peek of some of the features the app has in store.

As a way of being more customer-facing, we came up with the idea of gathering some useful customer information that will be used in providing a personalized experience for each customer.

For easy and fast ordering, the app allows users save their favorite meals. The app also remembers what you like and how you like it all saved in the order history.

To ensure an agile and intuitive system, users are able to select locations based on their geolocation. Users can also decide to choose a recently visited location or make a particular location(s) their favorite.

After the whole ordering and delivery process, we want users to be able to rate their experience and give us useful feedbacks that will ensure that we have effectively solved their pain points. This will also serve as a cue to identifying further solutions and how to solve them.

Working on this project afforded me a lot of lessons in user testing and how important user-centric designs are in converting customers. The design thinking, implementation, and customer journey gave a more in-depth understanding on how to identify problems, create proper assumptions and get concrete validations for solving those problems.