01 Overview
At a Glance
02 The Stakes
A Holiday Tradition, Stuck on Hold
Every November, Zippy’s Meals To Go became the busiest ordering channel of the year for the restaurant’s biggest holiday tradition. It also lived on a separate site, disconnected from Zippy’s main platform.
20% of all orders required a support call to complete. 75% of those calls needed a staff member to walk the customer through the site step by step, during the one week of the year when staff had the least time to give.
Customers picked a location before they had any way to know if their package was even available there. Someone driving 30 minutes to pick up a holiday order might not find that out until they called in to ask, or worse, until they got there and were told to try somewhere else.
I led the redesign of the new Meals To Go experience.
BeforeAfterThe constraint
We Inherited Olo
Meals To Go ran on Olo, the legacy system Zippy’s used for specialty orders like Meals To Go as well as its regular restaurant ordering. It couldn’t integrate with Zippy’s main ordering platform, its URLs changed every year, and every design decision had to work inside its limits. Here’s what it gave us.
2 of 58 bookable. Try one.
58 dates, 2 real ones
Olo pulled every future date without filtering for Meals To Go availability.
Availability buried
Customers drilled three levels deep before finding out a package wasn’t offered at their location.
Small, unclear touch points
Tiny, crowded controls made an overwhelming interface for customers with lower digital fluency.
No live inventory
Indicators like “Most popular” or “X packages left” weren’t technically possible.
03 The Reframe
It Was Never a Speed Problem
The brief was simple on paper. Redesign the ordering flow and integrate it into Zippy’s main platform. Make it faster.
On-site research complicated that fast. The internal systems serving kitchen and store operations ran on infrastructure outside our control, which took most of the original scope off the table before I drew a single wireframe. That left one sharper question. Of everything happening in the customer-facing experience, where was the highest-leverage problem?
I led stakeholder interviews across marketing, operations, customer service, and IT. Every department, independently, pointed to the same moment in the flow.
Marketing called it confusing. Operations called it their top source of errors. Customer service was absorbing the calls it generated.
What the Zippy’s team told us
“Abysmal.”
“The date selector is not intuitive and provides too many dates.”
Danica W.Loyalty & Customer InsightsProblem 01 · Date + Time Picker“The biggest roadblock.”
“Customers think that MTG can be found in the app; it’s actually two separate ordering systems.”
Marissa O.Digital StrategiesThe Olo constraint“Normal ‘order now’ button and MTG pre-order button is confusing for customers.”
Customer Service TeamMonica C., Elvira G. and Monica S.The Olo constraint“Digital duct tape.”
“Customers are confused about designating add-on items and labeling.”
Melissa Joy D.Digital StrategiesProblem 03 · Package Details
Cross-departmental alignment like that doesn’t happen around a usability problem. It happens around a trust problem.
Customers had learned the digital experience would waste their time, so they picked up the phone instead.
The question changed
Not how do we make ordering faster. Instead, how do we build something worth trusting again, for customers who’d already given up on it.
04 Who Was Affected
Designing for Leihua, and Thousands Like Her
Through stakeholder interviews across five departments (marketing, operations, digital experience, IT and customer service), we learned the primary users were ages 45 to 72, often tech-familiar but time-strapped, and needed confidence-building over novelty.
Primary users: ages 45–72
Leihua
- Age
- 54
- Job
- Elementary school teacher
- Feeds
- 14 people
- Nearest Zippy’s
- 30 min away
- She doesn’t have time to cook a full Thanksgiving spread this year.
- She’s ordered a Thanksgiving package before, but in person, because the website was too confusing.
- She lives 30 minutes away from the nearest Zippy’s.
- Have enough food to feed her entire family.
- Spend more time with her loved ones.
- Be less stressed during the holiday season.
- A location that has her specific package.
- Quick and easy online ordering.
- Extra add-ons, because of her large family.
- She needed: a location that has her packagePackage tags on every location card, so she knows before she picks. Decision 02 ↓
- She needed: quick and easy ordering2 pickup days instead of 58, shown as clear tiles. Decision 01 ↓
- She needed: extra add-ons for a big familyLarger add-on touchpoints and clearer groupings. Decision 03 ↓
“I want to be able to know that the package I ordered is enough to feed everyone in my family.”
Leihua represents thousands of local customers who gave up on ordering online because the experience was too confusing.
05 Competitors
What the Leaders Got Right
I co-led a SWOT analysis of 8 regional and national competitors offering similar holiday meal packages. The leaders in this space emphasized simplified pickup flows and package clarity up front. Pick one to see what it did well, where it fell short, and what we took from it.
✓ Did well
Great customization and visibility features.
✕ Fell short
An inefficient listing of available products.
→ What we took
Larger, clearer touch points for package selection. Easier to tap, easier to scan. Decision 03 ↓
✓ Did well
A streamlined ordering process and menu displays.
✕ Fell short
Lacked clarity in pickup dates and locations.
→ What we took
“Most ordered” indicators that guide choices by popularity. Olo couldn’t support them yet, so they’re on the roadmap. What’s Next ↓
✓ Did well
Strong promotional banner callouts.
✕ Fell short
The way packages were displayed lacked visual emphasis.
→ What we took
A reminder that packages need to be the hero of the page, not the banners around them. Decision 03 ↓
✓ Did well
Clear labeling features.
✕ Fell short
No distinct product separation for holiday packages.
→ What we took
Holiday ordering integrated into the main system. No separate site, no broken links year over year.
4 of the 8 competitors we analyzed.
06 The Problems
Where Trust Was Breaking
Three points in the flow were breaking trust, one at a time.
Problem 01
Date and Time Picker
The calendar displayed 58 date options. Only 2 were ever actually available. Customers scrolled past 56 dead ends before finding a real one, then called to confirm they hadn’t missed something.
Problem 02
Location Cards
Customers had no way to know whether a package was available at their nearest location until they’d already selected it. 25% of support calls traced back to this exact gap. For someone driving 30 minutes to pick up a holiday meal, finding out that late wasn’t a minor friction point. It was a broken promise.
Problem 03
Package Details
Included items and add-ons were mixed together with no clear hierarchy, and touchpoints were too small for the demographic actually placing these orders. It was the last friction point standing between a customer and checkout.
07 The Icon System
A Visual Language That Didn’t Exist Yet
There was no dedicated icon system for Meals To Go’s holiday packages. Zippy’s design system had exactly one icon, a sushi icon built for the regular menu.
That gap was both a problem and a decision. Customer service shared that about 1 in 4 calls were about package availability, which led the executive team to ask for availability right on the location cards. Before I could show availability, I had to build the language to show it in.
I designed 10 new icons from scratch, one per package. Each one had to meet three requirements at once.
- Match the existing systemFit stylistically with Zippy’s existing sushi icon: consistent line weight, level of detail and visual treatment.
- Be culturally recognizableThese are meals tied to Hawaiian culture. A laulau icon had to read as laulau, not a generic food silhouette, because the people ordering these meals would know the difference.
- Scale across contextsDesktop, mobile, print and social media. They had to work everywhere.
The full set
- Whole Turkey Package
- Half Turkey Package
- Whole Turkey Only
- Maki Sushi Roll
- Hawaiian Package
- Ozoni Soup
- Nishime Zip Meal
- Nishime Barrel
- Namasu Zip Meal
- Namasu Barrel
10 icons across 3 holidays
Creating these icons wasn’t just visual design, it required systems thinking. They became part of Zippy’s design language, reusable across future seasonal campaigns, and they set up the next decision: how much of the location card they should carry. Decision 02 ↓
08 The Decisions
Earning Trust Back, One Step at a Time
Three decisions, one for each place trust was breaking, built to take a customer from “I’ll just call” to a finished order.
DECISION 01
Cut the Picker From 58 Options to 2
The legacy design used a four-column layout with morning and afternoon toggles. Testing showed customers mistook it for two separate systems instead of one tabbed one. The final design moved to three columns, which removed the ambiguity, and collapsed to a single column on mobile.
BeforeAfterWhy it matteredThis was the universal pain point every department named independently, so fixing it first removed the primary driver of support calls.
DECISION 02
Surface Package Availability Before the Customer Commits
The icon system gave us the building blocks. The open question was how much of the location card those icons should carry, and my co-designer and I each saw a strong case for a different answer.
My take
Icon-heavy. Cleaner, less text, something that would scale better across formats.
Her take
Text-heavy. Explicit labels read clearer for the elderly customers this redesign was built around.
Together we built 10 iterations, then each narrowed them down to the direction we felt was most usable based on the data we’d collected. The rest of the team and Zippy’s stakeholders saw real logic in both, so instead of debating it further, we let the people ordering decide with an A/B test with 30 users. The split was generational. Customers under 40 preferred icons. Customers 45 to 72, Zippy’s core holiday demographic, preferred text, because referring back to a legend added cognitive load they didn’t want to carry.
The final product shipped with text labels, keeping the icons as a supporting layer rather than dropping them entirely. Clarity for the people most likely to call in mattered more than visual minimalism.
BeforeAfterWhy it matteredA quarter of all support calls traced back to this exact gap. How we got there mattered too. Neither of us was wrong, we were both still guessing at what actually served the customer until the data told us.
DECISION 03
Restructure Package Details for Confident Decisions
The final design separated included items from add-ons and enlarged touchpoints for the primary demographic, rebuilding the hierarchy so the page could be scanned instead of studied.
BeforeAfterWhy it matteredThis was the last barrier before checkout, and clearing it closed the trust-building arc the first two decisions had opened.
09 What Shipped
Launch Day, and What Customers Said
The redesigned experience launched in September 2025 across every participating location.
Michael Choy, Zippy’s Director of Support and Implementation, shared customer feedback collected across all three holiday seasons from 518 respondents.
And one line from the feedback said more than any chart could.
“I’m old and it was easy.”
Zippy’s customer, post-launch feedback
For a redesign built to rebuild confidence for customers aged 45 to 72, that was the clearest signal the work had landed.
10 What’s Next
Beyond the MVP
While our timeline for this project was limited, our team created a resource document for the Zippy’s team that outlined future areas that explore additional features beyond the MVP as they continue building. Here are some of the more notable recommendations from that document.
RECOMMENDATION 01
Order Changes After Checkout
Customer service reported frequent calls from users unable to edit orders after checkout. The new timed modification feature aims to give users the opportunity to modify orders in the event of mistakes, reducing customer support calls and manual cancellations by the customer services department.
RECOMMENDATION 02
Future Gifting Feature
Gifting was a popular request identified in meetings with the internal Zippy’s teams, as many customers wanted to send holiday packages to friends and family.
RECOMMENDATION 03
Enhanced Package Clarity
Further refining package groupings and adding inventory indicators for faster, more confident choices.
Where I’d Take It Next
The customers who still struggled cited pickup time selection, and several wished the experience lived inside Zippy’s main app rather than a separate holiday site. Both point at the same opportunity.
An AI-assisted reorder flow that surfaces last year’s selections upfront, paired with a contextual assistant that answers questions in real time, would give returning customers a reason to choose digital over the phone every season, not just once.
