Take Away & Delivery Service
DISH Order – Meal Ordering System

Industry:
Food delivery
What we did:
Meal Ordering System for Desktop & Mobile
My Role:
Workshop Facilitation, User Testing, UX Research, User Experience, Interface Design, Wireframes & Prototyping, Competitive Analysis, Responsive Web Design, Dev Handover
Client website
Challenge:
DISH Order is an online meal ordering system designed to empower small restaurant owners by providing them with an independent tool free from the constraints of traditional food delivery services. The system seamlessly integrates with any restaurant's website, offering a user-friendly management portal.
The objective was to design a user-friendly meal ordering system that would facilitate frictionless communication and hand-off between the restaurant, courier, and customer.
The scope included mapping the new user experience, creating a design library, and extensive research and competition benchmark. Additionally, insights from user interviews with restaurant owners were incorporated to address common challenges, resulting in improvements in customer retention, marketing communication, error reduction, and overall trust-building.
What’s on the Menu?
Restaurant owners can independently make menu changes, accept or decline orders, edit delivery times, meal times, opening hours, etc. All these changes needed to be reflected in the interface and promptly communicated to the user placing an order. One big challenge was accounting for all possible system errors (restaurant closed in the meantime, delivery not possible, item out of stock) and always giving the user a way out, a possibility to move forward.
The menu is designed to be scanned with ease — the system offers categories, tags, discounts, allergen sheets, and more to narrow down the choices quickly.
Order Customisation
The design accommodates different needs when it comes to meal preparation. Pizza by the slice? 5-piece menu? DIY salad? Whatever you’re cooking, we've got you covered. We created a set of customizable components that took advantage of such common components as dropdowns, radio buttons, checkboxes, and tiles, so that every restaurant can offer the full spectrum of options for each of their dishes, as complex as they may be.

Frictionless Hand-Off
The ultimate goal of the entire DISH Order system was clear communication and easy hand-off between the restaurant, courier, and customer. To accomplish that, we looked at the existing structure and pinpointed the critical handoff moments. That included live communication of menu changes, delivery tracking, restructuring the receipt for the kitchen and the courier.
But most importantly, we needed to establish a hierarchy of notifications for the end user — from the less interruptive ones, like toasts and alerts, to critical ones that require action, like full-screen modals.
Where Does Brand Happen?
The ordering system offers customization on a brand level. Restaurants can use marketing materials to expand their digital store with meal photos, restaurant splash image, logo, and brand colors.
Most DISH Order clients have no prior branding though, and rely mostly on meal descriptions. Therefore, the storefront needed to look great even in the most stripped-down version when no visual assets were available.
The Restaurant’s Perspective
It is not just end-user needs we needed to have in mind during the design process. We conducted dozens of user interviews with restaurant owners to understand their struggles with existing solutions. The new experience needed to help restaurants with their common problems:
Customer retention was improved through methods such as newsletters, loyalty programs, and tipping and rating options.
Restaurant owners were provided with templates for marketing communication.
Customer drop-off rates were lowered by reducing the number of system errors and clearly communicating changes in restaurant status.
Stores can build trust by using common payment methods without a lot of administration.
The system offers account creation and a list of saved locations for easy hand-off between devices.
