GO TO FOODS: ONE PRODUCT, SEVEN BRANDS
Role: Sr. UX Manager
Duration: December 2023-December 2024
Devices: Mobile App, Responsive Website
Tools: Figma, Token Studio, User Interviews
overview
Go To Foods was taking on a new digital initiative to create a core product that services all of their brands apps and websites. The purpose of this project was to make it easier to manage their digital products meanwhile being able to utilize shared APIs and feature functionality across all of their brands, and hopefully new brands to come.
Design challenge
Thus began our challenge of defining what would be considered a global feature and what would be a “delta” feature specific brands required. By understanding each brands user needs, we defined the UX flow for all the global features, like selecting a location, browsing menu, viewing product pages, adding items to cart, and the checkout flow.
Once these user flows were defined, the real challenge began… creating a white label DSM with all the core components that still allowed each brand’s style to come to life.
WHAT I DID
As the manager overseeing these teams, my role was to make sure the teams had all the support they needed to complete this work.
To accomplish this, here are some of the responsibilities I carried:
Setting program plan and design sprint cadence
Staffing (i.e. Interviews, creating design pods, assigning tasks, 1 on 1 meetings, etc.)
Weekly Status Report meetings to the client leadership members
Design review meetings with the team and providing UX design leadership
Feasibility meetings with engineers
Collaboration with Product Owners, Brand Teams, Dev Teams
Outlining architecture for Design Token System
And when needed, diving deep into the designs alongside the rest of the team
Resetting The project for success
Quick backstory. I adopted this project from a previous manager. Upon joining the team, they were already a month in but with all honestly I could sense the team struggling. Every member on the team felt burnt out and was having a difficult time managing the intense timeline of the project. It was moving too fast, the work was quick and dirty, and mistakes were made constantly.
My first goal in this project was to reset the project timeline. Working with the client and the development team, we came up with a program plan structure that gave the design team more room to breathe. I’ll admit this wasn’t easy. We were up against tight strict deadlines but after 14 different versions of the plan (yes 14 versions!), we landed on one that worked for all parties from a timeline and budget perspective.
Restructuring Design Pods
Originally the design pods were structured based on device (app or web). However, given the uniqueness of each brand and amount of knowledge transfer when starting a new brand required, we felt it was best to organize pods based on Brand rather than Device. This allowed the same design pod that designed Brand A’s app to also design Brand A’s website.
High Level Process
We started with a discovery phase across all brands to understand their needs and unique styles. With three weeks allocated for each brand for a discovery phase, a team works closely with the brand teams and if there are any unique feature functionalities require, ideate happy path flows to take into user testing.
Once discoveries were complete, we had 4 implementation design pods running in agile sprints. Through the implementation phases, the teams are working to skin the UX features already created and turn them in the brands unique look and feel, making the app feel like uniquely their own!
To top off the army behind this project, there are 2 skilled UI designers managing the Design System and ensuring all components in Figma are attached to design tokens and scalable across all brands.
White Label Design System
Given the need of the product to serve 7 very distinct brands, we needed to create a robust design system that would support this flexibility in the UI of the application. To accomplish this, we set up the design system to be grounded on Design Tokens hosted in Token Studio that would allow the tokens to be easily pulled into a GitHub repo for the developers.
The Result? One product but seven distinct brands
Home Page
Menu Page
PDP Page
Cart Page
Rewards Page
Offers Page
Business Impact
A single white label design system that makes for more efficient design updates
Improved efficiencies across design and development teams in the long term
A single product that allows the business to ship any one feature from one brand to any of the other brands through feature flagging
In the long term, the business can spend more time focusing on pushing out newer, more innovative features for brands with the time saved on maintaining 7 different apps and 7 different websites.