Leading Papa John's Native App Redesign
I started working as a product designer at Papa John’s in February 2018 and began leading the UX team a year later managing our digital agency. I led our digital experience platform including product management for AB testing, native app, web and customer insights.
The image below represents my roadmap from the end of 2020. My goal was for the digital UX at Papa John's to be on par with the best food ordering apps including Door Dash, Uber Eats, and Starbucks. We were held accountable for increasing conversion rate, and net app store downloads. Roughly ~1% in conversion rate increase was equal to $1 million in sales per week. So when I was able to increase conversion rate even a few basis points from UX improvements, it was really impactful to the business.
Identifying opportunities
When it comes to product and UX, we want to make sure we're spending our time working on parts of the experience that bring the most value to the user and business goals. In order to understand and prioritize new features and maintain our backlog, we look at quantitative data and qualitative user research to provide those insights. Understanding user journeys and data along that journey is critical to understand where to focus, and improve negative parts of the experience to increase KPI's and customer loyalty.
Research, process & design system
Our purpose is to accelerate customer value through the design & delivery of delightful end-to-end experiences. As part of our process, we conduct discovery research to ensure we are solving the right problems while establishing the objectives and key results. It is a user-centered process that starts with user data, creates design artifacts that address real and not imaginary user needs, and then tests those artifacts with real users.
We built and utilize a pattern library for our UX and front-end development practice so we are designing system of components rather than unique screens. Design systems aid in efficiency across an enterprise organization for speed and consistency. Design systems are fairly ubiquitous today, but when I started at Papa John's in 2018 they struggled to fully embrace a design system, so I was constantly working on improving the design system with my team and evangelizing it's value.
How it started
When I started at Papa John's in early 2018, the state of the holistic digital user experience was fragmented and disjointed. There were completely separate teams working on web, iOS, and Android who did not communicate with each other or use a shared design system. The image below represents the same functional screen across three platforms. The lack in a universal digital language was something I wanted to tackle, not only to make switching platforms for customers more familiar, but for internal teams to measure and maintain these products more cohesive.
AB Testing program
One of the main ways I got buy in from stakeholders was a series of successful AB Tests that lead to conversion rate improvements and ultimately, increased revenue. We had a pipeline of ideas that we created after looking through analytics data and other qualitative insights where we had hypothesis that would increase conversion rate if we improved these areas. Ultimately, we had many successful tests, of course some failed and some had no significant improvement. I built trust with a lot of business stakeholders through these incremental improvements that gave me the opportunity to pitch bigger redesigns across the end-to-end journey.
