Case study 02 — Food
Beets & Roots — Ordering healthy food, faster
Beets & Roots serves fresh bowls, salads and wraps across Germany’s busiest lunch districts. I redesigned the digital ordering experience so a full custom bowl could go from craving to checkout in under a minute — on a phone, in a queue.
Role
UX & UI design
Timeline
2020 — 2021
Scope
Web ordering, menu & checkout flows
Champions of good and healthy food
Beets & Roots is an innovative fast-casual concept, founded in 2016 by Michelinstarred chef Andreas Tuffentsammer and former Quandoo manager Max Kochen. Beets & Roots offers healthy, freshly made bowls, salads, wraps and soups of the highest quality.
The challenge
Our team set out to translate mission of connecting people to real food into a brand and online ordering experience. We needed to define a new model of ordering fast food, using efficiencies enabled by digital service design to create an incredible user experience that was anything but transactional. The brand itself needed to foster a personal connection to customers to generate loyalty.
Strategy
With a new platform, we worked to enhance the digital ordering experience to enable deeper engagement between the brand and its customers, to increase digital conversion. Our focus was on fostering loyalty by building more intimate, personal relationships with each customer. By developing a genuine understanding of each customer’s needs and behaviors, we could proactively curate a personalized Beets & Roots experience that produced a sense of being cared for.
We translated the strategy into a delightful digital product that enabled our prioritized features to manifest the connection between the individual and their local Beets & Roots store. From there, we designed a design system that ensured the experience was fluid across touchpoints and breakpoints. The visual language unified visual design, branding, interaction, and motion.
Custumize Your Bowl
Beets & Roots has 2 different services; pick up (B2C) and Catering (B2B). In the B2C platform, users can order online and either eat there or pick up from the stations in the restaurants. This reduces waiting time for the customers. They can choose when they will arrive and they don’t have to wait in line. The online experience allows users to create their own bowls or make modifications to existing bowls. Users can also decide if they want to have cutlery or a bag. This helps to decrease wasted equipments.
As we prepared to kick off a UX & Visual design process, I was eager to tackle the most complicated part of the experience first: the Bowl Builder. Unlike the existing platform, I wanted our experience to give users full control over their bowls, salads and wraps whether they started from scratch, or with one of Beets & Roots’s signature combinations.
Designing pages for websites and applications doesn't always produce the best results. The design process separates look, feel and process from what the user is trying to accomplish. Synthesized into a comprehensive User Flow, we visually outlined the digital experience of the Beets & Roots’s consumer thus focus on what the user needs to get done and how to deliver that in the most effective manner possible.
The entire ordering flow is designed to orbit around that crucial moment, but balancing a highly visual layout, simple controls, and powerful customization options was no easy task. The bowl builder would need to empower users to choose multiple portions of each ingredient. Users should feel free to choose the salad that they want, but also, one that Beets & Roots could actually build (and fit within its bowls in reality).
Using tools like Hotjar and good old fashioned Google Analytics, I closely monitored how users were engaging with the platform, keeping an eye out for sticky areas in the digital and physical aspects alike. I ordered bowls and salads almost every day to get a full sense of the end-to-end experience, and to help Beets & Roots find opportunities to refine its operations as it rolled out to more stores.