Drip & Dine

We started by listening in two directions: a long, honest founder interview (which surfaced the real constraints — pickup only, batch cooking, hidden address, ~€10–12 meals, students as the core audience) and a Lean UX canvas to name our riskiest assumption: would people really pay for, and travel to collect, food from a place with no track record?

A 21-response survey pressure-tested it: taste and quality beat price and delivery speed, openness to Nigerian food was high, but pre-ordering split the room. Three in-depth interviews explained why — trust is the whole game without reviews, nobody travels more than a few minutes for pickup, and order-status anxiety is the classic pain point. Everything was clustered into an affinity diagram; those insights became the backbone of every design decision.

The research became a person: a Groningen student — open to new food, time-poor, price-aware, drawn to authenticity, and wary of committing to a place she’s never tried. Mapping her emotional path through the current DM-based experience made the friction obvious: every low point was uncertainty. Is this place real? Where do I go? Will my food be ready?

It all funnelled into one guiding question: how might we help busy, curious people in Groningen confidently order and collect homemade Nigerian food from a business they’ve never tried before? That word — confidently — became the north star.

We drafted a deliberately lean structure — a Home that sells the story, a Menu that does the heavy lifting, an Our Story page for trust, and a clean cart-to-confirmation flow — then validated the labels with a card sort. The user flow introduces the two awkward truths (pickup only, pre-order) early and gently instead of springing them at checkout.

Crazy 8s sketching kept us honest: lots of fast, ugly layouts before committing, so we didn’t fall in love with the first idea.

We built the flow in greyscale mid-fidelity and tested it. The menu felt instantly familiar — the mental model was right. The one real stumble was telling: the user didn’t notice the “pickup only” label until he tried to work out the distance. That mapped directly onto our scariest research finding and earned pickup a bold, early placement in the final design.

Testing in greyscale did exactly what it should: it surfaced a hierarchy problem before visual polish could paper over it.

The founder wanted warm, colourful, and welcoming — and I wanted that to come from evidence, not taste. A moodboard plus a desirability test returned exactly the right words: inviting, friendly, joyous, festive, comfortable. Those became four brand pillars: warm & inviting, joyful, comfortable, culturally rich.

Translated into a system: a golden, honeyed palette with soft edible neutrals, Playfair Display for a sense of occasion, DM Sans for calm reading — plus buttons, tags, filters, and elevation, all documented so a non-designer founder can keep it consistent.

Research and brand finally meet on screen: real photography carries the homepage and menu, pickup is honest and early, the tight menu reads as focus rather than limitation, pre-order copy frames planning ahead as securing something good, and the flow closes with the clear confirmation the big apps so often forget.

We tested the hi-fi screens with users again, refined spacing, hierarchy, and labels, and pulled everything into the final component set for handoff.