Kozi Meals was invisioned as sort of a chef's plate style company where chefs in the greater Toronto area could create custom dishes for their patrons and you could order them through an app. While working alongside their developers I created the user experience for their application as well as designing their marketing site. Additionally I created their logo and brand identity as you can see below.
visit live site →Kozi Meals was planned to be an alternative to Uber Eats and Skip The Dishes. They wanted to be chef-focused, where any chef could create meals and create a kitchen on their platform.
Branding the concept was the first phase, we wanted to include a chef hat so there would be some instant recognization of what the brand stood for. We also played with the idea of a flame as a secondary icon.
Picking purple was key to attempt to differentiate from the food delivery companies out there which mostly use black or red. Yellow and blue were experimented with but in the end purple as the primary with orange as the secondary and green as the accent colour were chosen.
We also began discussing the actual application and what the user experience and design would look like. I mocked up some quick wireframes of how the platform would work, particularly the chef’s side of it.
With the brand finalized I moved on to desgining both the marketing website and the Kozi Meals application, for customers and for chefs. The user’s journey was relatively easy to map out as there were many examples in the world already that effectively showcased the ordering process, so I didn’t stray too far from that experience.
When it came to design for the chef’s point of view, this was trickier. Uber and Skip the Dishes didn’t really have a great user experience on the kitchen’s end. The main thing that I wanted to get across was large call to actions, and a small amount of clicks. A chef is doing enough already in their kitchen they don’t need to be fumbling through a complicated experience.
Working on the complete design of a product was quite daunting. It evolved over time as I was originally just supposed to create the brand but then I ended up being involved in all creative sides of the business. The biggest lessons learned were around the user experience from the chef or kitchen’s perspective. Doing user testing and working with actual people who were frustrated by other delivery and food ordering apps opened my eyes to how important it is to have a clean and simple experience for a user who barely has a second to interact with your product. I learned that real estate is king in app development and space is sacred. Even making a button 10% larger can have a huge positive effect on a user’s experience.
Sadly Kozi Meals never made it to market despite a fully working prototype that was demo’d around the country and tested for months. Their funding fell through and I’m not sure what ended up happening to the rest of the company but it was still a very exciting product to work on.
