Case study · UI / UX Design
Drip & Dine
Bringing homemade Nigerian food online for a brand-new business in Groningen, from Instagram DMs to a site people can browse, trust, and order from.
The problem
A couple in Groningen cooks Nigerian food people love, but every order lived in Instagram DMs, WhatsApp chats, and Facebook groups. Hard to manage, easy to lose, and impossible to grow.
On top of that: no reviews yet, pickup only, and meals that sell out daily, for an audience of students who want dinner sorted in under a minute. How does a brand new business with zero track record earn that kind of trust?
What we built
A warm, responsive ordering site covering the full journey: a story-driven homepage, an easy-to-browse menu, a pre-order flow, and a clear order confirmation.
Alongside it, a documented design system covering brand voice, colour, type, and components, built so the founders can keep it consistent without a designer in the room.
The tricky part
Every decision traces back to something a real person told us. Real food photography leads, because one interviewee said an AI-looking photo would kill her trust instantly. Pickup status is bold and early, because a test user missed the quiet version. The small all-Nigerian menu is framed as doing one thing really well, a strength rather than a limitation. And pre-ordering is sold as securing a fresh meal, not a rule to follow.
The outcome
Delivered end to end and presented to the founders and cohort: a scattered DM operation now looks and feels like a real, trustworthy place to buy dinner, ready for the September opening.
It opens in September, so success will be measured after launch — orders moving off Instagram DMs, first-time customers coming back, and pickups running smoothly.
The core lesson: good design earns trust; it is not decoration, especially for a business with no reviews to lean on.
Research & insights
We started by listening. A long founder interview surfaced the real constraints: pickup only, batch cooking, a hidden address, meals around 10 to 12 euros, and students as the core audience. A 21-response survey pressure-tested our riskiest assumption. Taste and quality beat price and 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 far for pickup, and order-status anxiety is the classic pain point.
The research became a person: a Groningen student, open to new food, time-poor, and wary of committing to a place she has never tried. Mapping her emotional path through the current DM experience made the friction obvious, and it funnelled into one guiding question. How might we help busy, curious people confidently order and collect homemade Nigerian food from a business they have never tried before?
Ideation & testing
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. Card sorting validated the labels, and Crazy 8s sketching kept us honest with lots of fast, rough layouts before committing to one.
We built the flow in greyscale and tested it. The menu felt instantly familiar, but one stumble was telling. The user did not notice the pickup-only label until he tried to work out the distance. That mapped straight onto our scariest research finding and earned pickup a bold, early placement in the final design.
Design & final screens
The founder wanted warm, colourful, and welcoming, and I wanted that to come from evidence. A moodboard plus a desirability test returned four brand pillars: warm and inviting, joyful, comfortable, and culturally rich. Translated into a system, that became a golden, honeyed palette, Playfair Display for a sense of occasion, DM Sans for calm reading, and documented components a non-designer founder can keep consistent.
Every visual decision traces back to something a real person told us. Real food photography leads, because one interviewee said an AI-looking photo would kill her trust instantly. Pickup status is bold and early. The small all-Nigerian menu is framed as doing one thing really well, and pre-ordering is sold as securing a fresh meal rather than a rule to follow.
Prototype
A walkthrough of the full ordering experience, on desktop and on mobile.
Interactive walkthrough coming soon.
Reflection
Delivered end to end and presented to the founders and the cohort, a scattered DM operation now looks and feels like a real, trustworthy place to buy dinner, ready for the September opening. The core lesson: good design earns trust; it is not decoration, especially for a business with no reviews to lean on.
Want the full process?
The complete detailed case study lives on Notion: every step, every tool, and every artifact.