Chopt Creative Salad Co.

Chopt is an east-coast salad chain with a mission to make healthy eating exciting for all people. They are part of Founders Table Restaurant Group, with over 120 restaurant locations.

Year

2022 - 2024

product design

Over the past three years, I've helped launch a brand new app and website, overhaul our loyalty program, re-design our group ordering feature, build sign-in with Google / Apple, and more.

product design: group ordering re-design

In 2023, I redesigned the group ordering feature for Chopt.

Problem: Currently, while customers can place individual orders, or large companies can request large catering salad & sandwich platters, there wasn't yet a middle option for gatherings to order personal salads, delivered all at once.

Solution: We designed Chopt Group Ordering so companies and groups can order personal, individual salads, but get it delivered all at once, under one check. Theres significant demand for this type of feature: company employees ordering their daily lunches, or teams ordering meals for a corporate offsite, or friend groups who each want a unique item, and more.

While designing group ordering, I elevated several features:

1. A simple and easy experience for the administrator. The order admin has no easy feat, coordinating individual orders of anywhere between 2 to 200 people. I made added 1-click group order link sharing, gave them easy edit access to change items in a person's suborder, and collapsable names so they can quickly scan through dozens of suborders at once. If admins started a regular order by accident, I designed it so they can also easily convert it to a group order. I added more error states that customers can reach, if they ordered after the delivery cut-off time, and we funnel them to placing a regular delivery order.

2. Seamless order add-ons and adjustments. Both the admin and other customers need to be able to add on snacks, drinks, and modify their order easily. We added "complete your meal" snack recommendations in the cart, elevated the salad edit button, and streamlined item removal (when you only have 1 quantity of an item in cart, the deletion button pops up, otherwise the buttons show + and - your quantity).

3. A beautiful and clear user interface. As I re-skinned our group ordering feature, I put a lot of thought into information and button hierarchy, where the most used buttons (like "add an order") are large and at the top. The checkout page shows the order of information as admins most like to see (interactive elements like adjusting time of the order at the top), and the final summary of items + payment at the bottom. Admins can easily expand information and print the confirmation page as a receipt for their company invoices.

customer experience research

Situation: To design a powerful future-state experience for Chopt, we spent 3 months conducting research on digital ordering specifically.

Digital is how how ~50% of our orders for Chopt and ~35% of our orders for Dos Toros come through.

The goal was to compile the best practices from competitors in digital customer experience / order pickup & delivery experience. We used that inform the new Chopt & Dos Toros loyalty program design, and develop a roadmap for future customer experience features to build. I brought in the restaurant founders for both brands to conduct the competitor site visits.

In total, the founders and I visited 15 brands: Starbucks, Cava, Tocaya, North Italia, Panera, DIG, Sweetgreen, Souvla, Shake Shack, McDonalds, Chipotle, Dominos Pizza, Habit burger, Raising Cane's, and Dutch Bros.

Below is an example of our competitive research for Sweetgreen, where I called out the digital features we loved and aspire to incorporate for Chopt. I also compiled our 2024 roadmap of features we incorporated, and reach features for future product enhancements, prioritized by our engineering bandwidth, customer need, and sales impact.

When we say "customer experience" research, that means the full digital customer experience, which extends past the point of order on the app, and into how you pick-up the digital order in store, or get it delivered to your doorstep

These touchpoints after the app still matter. From the site visits, I also dove into what defines best-in-class from the in-store pickup, delivery, packaging, and placement experience all the way to when the food arrives in our customer's hands.

real-time customer feedback

In 2023, I designed an ongoing email campaign to dynamically reach out to customers for feedback after they order. I set up a connection to pass order data from our backend databases into Braze (our marketing engine), which would send an feedback request email, and customer responses would be fed into a Google Analytics report.

This provides us significantly more powerful data, for example: we know exactly which restaurant location and menu item the customer ordered and tie that to their satisfaction with all touch-points, including menu items, seasonal offerings, the digital ordering experience, our store atmosphere, and more.

I then designed automatically updating reports that funnel this data to our various internal teams. Our operations and restaurant general managers can see specific information on their stores and markets, to make improvements to customer experience in-store. If a customer gets cold chicken on their salad, we'll know right away. If customers report missing dressings in their pickup orders, the stores fix it. After launch, the operations team has used these reports during their weekly meetings.

This feedback also helps us prioritize the digital roadmap. When customers ask for an adjustment to group ordering, or a checkout flow, we see it, and we build it.

Since launch in April 2023, we've collected over 80,000 responses, and it's had a significant positive impact on the business.