An experience tailored to your every craving

Business strategy — Product design — AI

Laura Cuttier
12 min readJun 8, 2023
NAP Pizzería

We know that for those days when we don’t feel like leaving the house, we find it very convenient to order food at home, right? But how many times have we found that our favourite restaurant doesn’t offer this service and we have no choice but to buy from the competition? How many times have we gone through a tedious, and sometimes frustrating, shopping experience?

With the heartfelt mission of transporting a piece of Naples, their hometown, to the cosmopolitan cities of Spain, the owners of NAP, a pizzeria located in Spain with restaurants in six cities, envisioned sharing the authentic “è così che facciamo” spirit with their patrons. This passion for genuine “Verace Pizza Napoletana” shines through in the exceptional quality and taste of their creations.

About my role

As an End-to-End Product Designer, I’ve had the privilege of spearheading various aspects of this project, from crafting a comprehensive business strategy to crafting a user-centric product experience. My contributions have included:

✅ Defining business strategy, objectives, and OKRs.

✅ Developing a compelling product strategy, value proposition, and NSM (North Star Metric).

✅ Conducting thorough user research, including competitive analysis, interviews, user persona, user journey map, and LDJ workshops.

✅ Designing an intuitive information architecture.

✅ Creating a clear flowchart for the product’s flow.

✅ Crafting wireframes and screens flows to visualize the user experience.

✅ Conducting user validation tests to gather feedback and refine the design.

✅ Implementing a cohesive visual design and crafting impactful copywriting.

✅ Defining key metrics to measure the product’s success.

Purpose, mission and vision

Purpose, mission and vision are the heart and the reason for being in every company. If we are clear about these, we will be clear about our value proposition. For NAP, are these:

Purpose: We are committed to making our customers know and fall in love with the true Neapolitan culture. Mission: Our mission is to create products with a true Neapolitan essence so that all our customers get to know the traditional taste of Naples at an affordable price. Vision: To make our customers feel the real Neapolitan taste, at an affordable price.

Defining the model

To carry out a business we have to put our ideas in order, be very clear about what will make us special and different from the competition, the real value we want to provide and the benefits we can gain from the success of our product.

Designing our Lean Canvas Model, as a benefit it has brought us:

  • To provide a clear overview
  • To focus on customer needs
  • To encourage experimentation
  • To promote collaboration
  • To help with decision-making
Lean Canval Model
Lean Canvas Model for NAP

Objectives to be achieved

First things: Annual objectives and OKRs. They provide clarity and transparency around what the organisation is trying to achieve and how progress will be measured. This can help improve accountability and ensure that everyone is working towards the same goals.

Annual goal: Expand sales channels and increase online sales. Product goal: Increase online sales opportunities at local level. KR (Key Results): Create an in-house online sales channel. Implement tools to measure Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Visualising the idea to achieve the goal

Staying in the right way: A product board helps the product team stay focused on user needs and value. The team can ensure that they are delivering a product that meets the needs of their target users and provides them with a great user experience.

To create the product vision, we have been inspired by The Golden Circle:

Why: In everything we do, we believe we can make our customers feel the Neapolitan culture while being far away from Naples.

How: We create products that are affordable and accessible to all of our customers, using original ingredients from Naples.

What: We sell authentic artisanal pizza through an online service.

Product Board
Product Board for new online service

Our brightest star

With our product strategy in place, we have defined our key metric, our true North Star Metric:

⭐️ NSM ⭐️: Quantity of pizzas sold.

Now, Empathise

For our Design Process, we have used the Design Thinking methodology, which consists in five stages: Empathise, Define, Evaluate, Ideate, Prototype, and start again. Here you can see all the points of the Research Plan.

❗️The Problem

More than a problem, what we have identified at NAP was the business opportunity in a time of pure technology. So, we have that:

NAP currently only offers home delivery through external providers such as Glovo and Just Eat, which conditions the opportunity to understand the behaviour of our online audience and adapt our service to their needs.

🔎 Competitive Analysis

First things first, as soon as I was clear about the “problem” I set out to do an analysis of what the competition currently does.

I highlighted an article listing the only 14 pizzerias in Spain that offer products with the seal of the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana (AVPN), of which only one of them has a home delivery service. Therefore, by expanding the search I have made a selection of other pizzerias that offer Neapolitan and American style pizza (mainly in Barcelona and Madrid) and have a home delivery service in order to analyse their functionalities regarding user experience.

Competition Analysis
Competitive Analysis

🗣️ User interviews and Analysis

For the 1–1 interviews, I interviewed a total of five people who provided valuable insights.

I have taken these three interview profiles as a reference:

User Interviews
Types of participants

We see that we have three different profiles that all make use of home delivery services, depending on the reason, perhaps the one that stands out the most and may be a recurrent user is participant #1 who works long hours and does not have time to cook. He tends to order at least once a week, while the profile of participant #2 only tends to order on special occasions at least once a month.

We do not talk much about participant #3, but in this study, the role of the staff members who are in charge of the quality of the service, seemed fundamental to me. This profile makes use of the digital service from the other side when orders are received at the pizzeria, and throughout their working day.

Time to Define

👥 User Personas

After analysing all the previous data, I have gone on to design two types of User Personas that we will focus on in all the exercises below:

Giovanni: our customer who loves to spend time with his loved ones, and is always willing to try new things, especially from his favourite restaurants.

Lizza: our staff member, who gives her best and cares about the quality of the service she offers to the customers.

User Personas
User Personas for NAP

📍 User Journey Maps

Based upon data from previous User Personas, I organised my observations and categorised them using a user journey map. This helped me expose pain points and areas to improve in the service along the entire user journey. Furthermore, I identified various opportunities we have as a business to improve the user experience at some touch points.

User Journey Maps

Balancing user needs with business goals — Ideate

The initial research established an important basis on which to build ideas for the next stage of brainstorming with stakeholders.

I prepared a workshop using the LDJ (Lightning Decision Jam) framework with the following objectives:

➡️ Identify the pros and cons of the online service also on a technical level.

➡️ To prioritise the best long-term solution.

In the 60 minutes session the participants provided a lot of insights regarding the advantages and disadvantages of providing an in-house online ordering service and how we could integrate improvements that benefit both users (customer and staff members) in a user-friendly way that is easy to maintain over time.

LDJ framework used in the workshop
LDJ Framework on FigJam

🏆 The Challenge

During the LDJ session, we redefined the challenge, which would now be our focus for ideating the best solution:

Unify processes in a way that is easy for everyone to use, easy to implement and easy to update.

🥁 The Solution

After analysing, organising and prioritising all the proposed ideas and with focus on the goal, we voted on the best solution to implement. In the Impact/Effort matrix we saw that perhaps the effort is greater but so is the impact, so some short-term actionable solutions were decided upon in order to be able to analyse the feasibility and effectiveness of the solution.

The winner:

An automated platform that integrates technology with an AI model (LLM) that is able to collect information from the internet and can be trained according to our needs.

Actionable solutions in short-term include:

  • Investigate how to adapt the AI to an optimal user experience (design and development).
  • Investigate POS System tools and providers that offer an automated service to organise incoming orders from various systems on a single platform.

Regarding the design of the solution, after a lot of research on how artificial intelligence can be adapted to the online sales service of a pizzeria, more than anything else, I have learned that this technology is very powerful and can adapt quite well to the various user profiles, and can be able to make personalised recommendations depending on the profile type, which is great for the customer as it would save a lot of time of all that “scrolling” they usually do until they get to the option they like most. This would improve the shopping experience by reducing the time it takes to make a decision during the process.

Designing the solution — Prototype

🔧 Setting up the structure

I refined the concept with research outcomes in-line with our business goals and went through a few rounds of iteration using hand sketching. I also came up with a simplified information architecture that focused on the ordering process of the customer side, as for the pizzeria staff platform an automated POS System from a supplier is expected to be analysed by the technical team.

Information Architecture
Information Architecture

💡 Ideas to action

After doing many different concept tests, I came up with the one that best distinguishes itself from the competition, and is able to combine all of these:

✅ It is intuitive and familiar.

✅ It is agile and adapts to the preferences of users.

✅ It is innovative and trendy.

✅ It is easy to use for young and adults.

✅ Integrates technology that is able to adapt and automate itself.

All these features are delivered in a main Chatbot integrated in a responsive web platform.

✏️ Flowchart and Screens Flows

Flowchart
High Definition Screen Flows

Lets test it

For the usability and comprehension test, I carried out a qualitative study of the proposed prototype, with different interactions in its main functionalities.

The characteristics of the study were as follows:

➡️ Purpose of the study

  • To find out whether users correctly identify, understand and interact with the proposed solution.

➡️ Methodology

  • Unmoderated remote testing: interactive prototype + questionnaire (online testing tool)

➡️ Segment

  • 10 mobile and desktop users, residents of Spain aged between 20 and 60, who are used to ordering food online.

➡️ Results of the study

  • Overall, the results were quite positive in terms of received feedback in the questionnaires (original results in Spanish):
Prototype Validation Test Results

🟩 Some positive comments:

“I thought it was a very good idea, personal treatment without being physically present.”

“The process was quick and efficient, which can be crucial for customers who value their time.”

“It was like having a waiter in front of you”.

🟧 Some neutral comments:

“Interesting that a chatbot helps to place the order quickly, however nowadays simplicity of things and speed is what is gaining ground so I would ask myself, if typing in text to a bot that makes it easier for me to place the order is a better option than showing the options and giving two or three clicks until I finalise the purchase.”

🟥 And the negative comments:

“The traditional way is easier for me”.

“I didn’t like the chat, I think it slows down the order process”.

The analysis of results has been crucial to detect what needed to be improved in terms of usability, comprehension and functionalities of the initial proposed solution. Therefore, I highlight two important points that should be improved in an iteration:

⚠️ Being able to complete the whole process through chat, including payment: this would be a great improvement for users, meanwhile an analysis by the engineering team is pending, as we need to know if this type of functionality would be feasible regarding all security limitations.

⚠️ The visibility and accessibility of the cart: an interesting feedback, which we will improve in the next iteration to include it in the final design.

Visual design

For the interface design I have followed the styles of the existing NAP brand manual. I have made an initial UIKIT with tokens that will be the basis of a Design System.

UIKIT for NAP

The visual design has been created with a mobile-first mindset, which is adaptable to tablet and desktop (web-app) platforms.

Final UX-UI Design

In the first video we see the new customised experience with a user-friendly tone, in the interaction with our chatbot:

However, in the second video we see the flow of the traditional experience included in our product as well:

In this way, we try to meet the needs and preferences of our users, while most of them had positive feedback from the chatbot experience, we do not forget those who have preferred the traditional ordering experience.

Data Analysis

We now move on to define the key metrics (KPIs) of our new product-service in order to gain useful and valuable information about the behavior of our users and to measure certain variables and results based on them.

Let’s remember our North Star Metric defined above:

⭐️ NSM ⭐️: Quantity of pizzas sold.

➡️ KPIs

  • Number of users who interact with the chatbot and finish the purchase process.
  • Number of times they finish the purchase process from the standard product list.

➡️ Acquisition metrics

  • Bounce Rate / Weekly
  • Conversion Rate / Weekly

➡️ Activation metrics

  • Time to Value (TTV) / Monthly

➡️ Engagement metrics

  • WAU (Weekly Active Users)
  • User Satisfaction / Weekly
  • Session Length / Weekly
  • User Feedback Score / Weekly

➡️ Retention metrics

  • Churn rate / Monthly
  • User Retention Rate / Monthly
  • Customer Lifetime / 1/Churn Rate

➡️ Revenue metrics

  • Expansion Revenue / Monthly

➡️ Referral metrics

  • Net Promoter Score (NPS) / Weekly

➡️ User Activity

  • Number of new users
  • Number of active users
  • Number of users who interact with the chatbot until they reach the shopping cart
  • How many times they interact with the chatbot within the same session
  • How many users add products to the cart from the standard product list
  • How many users change city
  • How many users complete the order as a guest
  • How many users register an account

Last but not least, what’s next?

I have kept a list of possible features that could be improved in the iteration of the initial product:

🔜 A loyalty program where users can accumulate points and enjoy vouchers, discounts and gifts for their birthday.

🔜 The chatbot should be able to finalise the purchase.

🔜 Add the voice command to the chatbot, so that blind people can interact with it.

🔜 Once defined the POS System platform provider that will integrate all incoming orders, see the possibility to integrate also the chatbot for the staff members.

🔜 The chatbot for the pizzeria staff will have the possibility to vote for the employee of the month and send kuddos to boost motivation and improve the relationship and integration between co-workers.

Conclusions

This project was an excellent opportunity to put into practice all steps within a design process of an End-to-End Product designer, a case study that seems simple but has been challenging, a whole world from the perspective of data analysis and language learning models that opens endless opportunities for us as professionals, for me, a super motivating journey to continue learning, sharing, and giving my best, expanding the holistic vision of the product that goes from the business strategy to the results analysis and keep iterating and learning from our teachers, the users, to whom I hope to always keep providing value to improve somehow their quality of life and give them a little of that which is now so scarce in these digital times: more time to enjoy with their loved ones.

Arrivederci 😊. Keep doing your best!

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Laura Cuttier
Laura Cuttier

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