foodtech • 2020 — 2022
My role
associate director – ux
Jubilant’s digital products were becoming an increasingly important part of how customers experienced its brands, but the design capability supporting them was still nascent.
I joined to build that capability. Over the following years, the design organisation grew from 1 to 15, while its role expanded from delivering interfaces to shaping customer experience across some of the company’s most important digital journeys.
The largest expression of that shift was Domino’s. Research and behavioural data helped us move the product beyond the mechanics of ordering towards a more emotional, discovery-led food experience, while redesigning critical journeys such as location, cart and payment around both customer and operational outcomes. The capability we built later extended to launching Popeyes digitally in India.
1 → 15
Design organisation built
20.3% ↑
Conversion with the new experience
₹20 Cr
Incremental annual revenue
0 → 1
Popeyes digital launch
01 · DESIGN CAPABILITY
The ambition for digital was growing faster than the design capability supporting it. Building the function meant more than hiring designers. It meant defining the skills we needed, structuring the team around the product portfolio, establishing ways of working with Product and Engineering, and creating a consistent quality bar across brands and platforms.
The team grew from 1 to 15, bringing together product, interaction and visual design capability. As the organisation matured, Design increasingly entered conversations earlier, using research, data and experimentation to help shape the problems being solved rather than only the interfaces being delivered.
The team was being built at the same time as the product it was responsible for transforming.
02 · DOMINO’S
Domino's digital experience had become very good at helping someone complete an order. But efficiency alone wasn't enough for a food brand. The experience also had to create appetite, make discovery easier and give customers a reason to explore. Research, customer behaviour, competitive analysis and existing product data helped the team examine how people decided what to eat, what drew their attention and where the digital experience was getting in the way. That led to a broader shift in experience strategy: from treating the product as an ordering utility to treating it as a digital expression of the food and the brand.
03 · THE ENTIRE JOURNEY MATTERED
A more engaging homepage meant little if customers still struggled at the moments that determined whether an order could actually be completed. The reframe from ordering to wanting had to hold everywhere a customer made a decision, not just the homepage. Location and address, cart and payment represented some of the most consequential points in the journey. They were also where customer experience and restaurant operations intersected most directly. The team combined research, funnel behaviour, competitive analysis and operational constraints to rethink these journeys together, rather than treating them as isolated screens.
Home
Deep menu · Ratings, taste profile and social proof help customers decide faster
Home, reimagined · A food-forward canvas built for discovery, not just ordering
Location & Address
Old vs. new map interface · Area boundaries, points of interest and smarter zoom replaced a dated, error-prone map
Cart & Payment
Before/after · Simplified checkout removed redundant steps and moved customers straight to payment
04 · CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE × OPERATIONS
Location, cart and payment sat at the intersection of digital experience and physical fulfilment. Improving them therefore wasn't only about reducing customer friction. Better decisions upstream could also reduce avoidable operational effort downstream.
Designing around serviceability, order accuracy and clearer customer decisions helped the team connect experience improvements with the economics of fulfilling an order.
Revamp
No dead-ends · Nudging non-deliverable customers to takeaway or a nearby store instead of a dead end: 44.5pp uplift in conversion (0.54% → 0.98%)
05 · POPEYES
Domino's was about transforming an established digital business. Popeyes presented a different challenge: bringing a global brand into India and creating its digital experience from the ground up.
The team translated the personality of Popeyes into the Indian digital context while building the foundations required to support discovery, ordering and launch.
For me, it was also evidence that the design capability we had built could travel. The team, practices and quality bar developed while transforming Domino's could now support an entirely new brand from 0 → 1.
OUTCOME
What began as building a design team became a broader product capability. The organisation grew from 1 to 15, Domino's moved from a largely transactional ordering experience towards a more differentiated digital brand, and design decisions increasingly connected customer behaviour with commercial and operational outcomes.
That capability ultimately extended beyond improving an existing product to helping launch an entirely new brand.
1 → 15
Design organisation
20.3% ↑
Conversion
₹20 Cr
Incremental annual revenue
4.7 / 4.2
App Store / Play Store