After extensive market research, I have noticed an issue with popular cafe spots. The traditional idea of running a cafe has been for people to meet their friends and enjoy a little treat. However, in recent years and especially in the bigger cities we have noticed a significant growth of popularity in ordering food for take-away. Who’s got time to cook and bake these days, right? Also, during the Covid pandemic there has been an increased rise in take-away food, as people could not eat out, so there is that reason too.

There have been more take-away apps popping up recently, but most of them provide us with main dishes and starters, and rarely deserts. Let’s imagine the situation where we are planning our friend’s birthday and want to make it special or we have a craving for sweet sweet macarons or other pastries, but we have got no time to pick them up or we live too far from our favourite cafe. Also during work time, when we want to grab our favourite coffee, but don’t want to waste our lunch break and stay in line, we can schedule to pick up our favourite beverage ahead of time! Take away app is there to help with those struggles.

Another thing is, in the past, we used to call for take away food or order it on our computer. Nowadays, especially when it comes to convenience, it just makes more sense to have the option to order our coffee on the phone, on the way to the cafe, as opposed to using a laptop/computer to do that. It gives people the opportunity to be more flexible and more spontaneous.

Reasons why cafes that have no app might be in trouble:

• Queues at the cafe - Having to wait in long queues during lunchtime

• No variety of take-away options - Lack of take-away options for luxury sweet treats. Most take-away apps only offer main dishes and starters

• Availability - Distance from the cafe or lack of time

• The simplicity of experience at the cafe - Cafes have become very popular places for meet-ups or quick lunch break at work. How do we make the experience even smoother?

Solution:

• Queues at the cafe - Order Scheduling on the app is the solution to that

• No variety of take-away options - The app offers a wide range of sweet treats that can be ordered in a couple of steps on the phone in small quantities or in bigger quantities for the major work/life events

• Availability - No matter if you live close or far to the cafe, have no time to come pick up your sweet treats, the app is going to resolve the issue of not being able to purchase favourite desserts

• The simplicity of experience at the cafe - With the app we can pay for our order from the comfort of our phone without even having to queue to order, or even worse when come to a new place and we don’t know what we want to order and we stay in this awkward silence trying to decide on our drink and everyone in the queue waiting annoyed. We can avoid all of that awkwardness, as all drinks and pastries can be seen on the app so that we can decide ahead of time on that caramel iced latte.

I experimented with many different design styles. I knew that I wanted the UI of the app to convey a feeling of sweetness and make the user think of a dessert. I searched Dribble, Pinterest and Behance for UI inspiration. Finally, after many iterations, I found a style that was not only pleasing to the eye but was also functional. It was important for the design to be easily recognisable, to be easy to use by the customers and easy to build upon, as we would add more items to the menu. For the colour scheme, I decided to use pink and pistachio, as they remind me the most of macaron colours and I wanted my design to express the kind of product that’s being sold aka - sweets! ( cakes, muffins, macarons, and various coffee drinks). For the font, I went with sans-serif Seravek bold and regular. I picked it due to its softly rounded corners and the modern look. Here is the final design.