Good Goods

Empowering  sustainability through reuse

Good Goods had figured how to do something really powerful – deliver fresh meals through a vending machine and have their customers actually return the food containers. They wanted help with speeding up transactions and improving the customer experience for their new machines.


Team

UXR: Myself
Product Design: Myself
Engineering: Paul Christophe

Outcomes

Good Goods had the right ingredients but they were not working together to create a stellar customer experience.

As a favor to the founders I conducted an expert review of the product and landed the opportunity to redesign the whole customer experience. In my review I identified several opportunities for improvement:

  • Finding your meal was tedious because all the meals were thrown into one menu, this led to time conscious customers going elsewhere.
  • The category menu was easy to miss because it was placed below your line of sight – this kept customers from discovering the breath of the menu.
  • Checking out of your shopping cart was slow because of unnecessary input fields, this led to cart abandonment.
  • There was no way to contact the company if something went wrong while ordering a meal – which happened to me.

Process – a week long UXR study of existing vending.

In just weeks before the Pandemic started I visited vending machines all around Manhattan and Brooklyn to document and learn what a great vending machine experience was like. I identified a number of design patterns we could learn from:

  • Keep the number of items per screen to a minimum.
  • Side category navigation for optimal location and mapping of items.
  • Provide a dedicated ingredient button to make ingredients easy to find.
  • Up-selling can be done at multiple places in the flow. We should test where the sweet spot is. A natural way to upsell is through meal combos.
  • Information collection such as phone numbers works best as its own separate step.
  • Explore different ways that the user can authenticate for returns and future loyalty programs

Focus on the important parts of the product first.

After mapping out the flow and reviewing it with the team I designed the new application section by section.

Below are a couple of prototypes of the main flows through the kiosk. The UI is actually full scale, so that we could test incrementally on the machines in development.


I borrowed the best features of McDonald's App – the side navigation for best onscreen visibility and dynamic popular and time of day menus.

I added an animation whenever you added a food item to the cart to draw attention to the shopping cart.

Ingredients front and center to demonstrate freshness and help customers with food allergies.

Prominent calls to action for checking out + opportunities to up sell.

Personalized menus returning customers.

Smart check out for returning customers.

With remote teams having a thorough design specs is key

My focus was to get a complete set of flows designed and specified so that development could begin. In parallel Good Goods had engaged a branding firm that was going to give a facelift to the brand.

In phase two I would have developed a complete design system…but the pandemic struck and ended the project.

Sometimes a Pandemic gets in the way.

The Pandemic killed Goods Goods business model, nobody was going to the office, nobody was willing to touch a vending machine, but the company was ahead of its time in identifying a unique opportunity to make a more sustainable future.