Mod's Maddog pizza
Mod's Dominic pizza
Mod's Viviana pizza
Mod's salad bowl
Mod's deluxe salad
Mod Pizza
MOD's Desktop mockup

A fresh take on Personalized Pizzas

How I helped influence the way customers order

MOD Pizza is a Seattle-based pizza restaurant chain. What sets them apart from other popular pizza joints is their “any toppings, same price” business model. It allows customers to top off their pizzas/salads with 30 different choices at the same price. But, with maximum freedom of customization, comes the pizza mountain; a pizza is overloaded with a large number of toppings. This leads to uneven bakes and poor flavor combinations. MOD Pizza would like to stop this for the sake of ingredient costs and the sanity of its employees.

I was hungry to help. With the support of two individuals, we unpacked MOD's online ordering experience. As the lead visual designer, I created our concepts from low to high-fidelity compositions; while helping with interaction and generating user feedback. After ten weeks of thinking about pizza, we ensured MOD and their customers got the most delicious experience possible.

Product Design, Strategy

How might MOD encourage online customers from ordering less toppings on their pizza?

Lets unbox this. The challenge to this ask is particularly rooted in MOD Pizza’s unlimited topping branding and the online space. Because of the judgement-free online ordering experience, customers are adding more toppings to their pizzas than they do when ordering at the restaurant. My team and I wondered how we can persuade customers without breaking MOD’s promise.

Guiding Principles

To align with the MOD’s business goals, we created a set of target guidelines to drive the redesign:

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Reduce the total of Create-Your-Own pizza/salads by 10%

Reduce the complexity of making Create-Your-Own pizzas and salads with too many ingredients — which potentially helps out the MOD employee

Create a system aligning with MOD’s current ordering framework (Olo.com)

Understanding Expectations

The MOD customer is a pizza lover, and who doesn't love pizza? A pizza lover could be a mom with multiple kids, a busy lunchtime professional, or simply, a group of friends going out for a meal.

‍So we went out and engaged in conversations with eight different MOD customers — varying from the age of 20 to 55 with experience ordering online and in-store. From our observations, we then discovered what the customers highly value in the MOD experience:

1. A BIG TRUST IN MOD AS THE “PIZZA EXPERT"

Customers enjoyed getting advice from the employees when personalizing their pizzas in-store. Our team wondered if this helped customers order less toppings per pizza when ordering in-person.

two pizzas on counter top

2. Unevenly cooked dough is a bad pizza

So, what makes a bad pizza? Our pizza lovers had some strong opinions. Many have mentioned the pizza dough is what makes or breaks a MOD pizza, no matter how good the toppings. We then started thinking less about preventing the customer from adding too many toppings — rather, engaging them to change their behaviors. If having too many toppings is what under cooking a pizza, then surely involving MOD’s guidance can result in a better product — without going back to their promise.

3. IMAGES OF FOOD HELP INFORM DECISION-MAKING

A picture says a thousand words. Currently, MOD’s ordering platform has no images of toppings or any classic pizzas to help guide online customers. Almost every participant we engaged with talked about the importance of food imagery, letting them know exactly what they are getting.

a web page of MOD menu

Helping Customers Getting their Favorite Pizzas

We broke our problem down into two key “how might we” questions and began to work on them in parallel:

  1. How might we entice customers to order MOD signature pizza options instead of creating their own?
  2. How might we provide guidance for customers to encourage them to choose fewer toppings?

After understanding these questions, my team and I did multiple Crazy 8’s sketching sessions and decided on three main solutions via a dot voting exercise. We then took our proposed solutions to Kevin Flaherty, VP of Marketing at MOD, to validate our direction. With positive feedback, we quickly and carefully prepared our prototype to test with five participants.

01. Disclaimer vs. Recommendations

We wanted to marry MOD's promises with recommendations to make sure that consumers end up with a mouth-watery pizza combination. So we turned to pop-up modals. Pop-up modals are used to give either suggestions or disclaimers when customers are loading more than 7 toppings during the Create-Your-Own process. Providing a similar guiding experience to what the customer would get in-store.

The modal was also delicately designed so it can pop up only once during the customization flow. If it was dismissed, the customers were free to continue to add toppings without a hard restriction — which is central to MOD’s branding.

New MOD's disclaimer pop-up

02. MAKE SIGNATURE PIZZAS MORE ENTICING / EASIER TO ORDER

Have you ever seen a picture of delicious meal and drooled just a little? I definitely have. With this, I incorporated the use of card design to house appealing imagery and clear information in one spot. I added a button allowing users to quickly add items to their cart without prompting them to the Create-Your-Own page. A little tag pill is also included to show popularity ratings in the item.

New MOD's pizza content card
New MOD's pizza content card

03. MENU HIERARCHY

Adding another way to intercept extreme customization, the MOD’s menu is reorganized with different categories of vegetarians and non-vegetarians options.

Reinforcing this idea, MOD’s featured pizzas/salads are also moved to the top while the Create-Your-Own option is de-emphasized. This helped guide the customers to the MOD’s popular pizzas featured on top. Interestingly, some even used the cheese pizza option as a way to start their own customization process.

New MOD's menu layout

Making A Scalable System

I created a system that made MOD's site better and enticing. I analyzed Olo’s platform and its respective clients to make sure our designs are feasible and scalable within their framework. Also, the MOD Pizza’s brand book and their current homepage were taken into consideration to establish consistency and clarity within the UI components.

‍Roboto is chosen as the main body type because of its friendly and open curves. I then paired it with Oswald, the font MOD currently uses for heading to maintain a consistency.

By utilizing both MOD's and Olo's guidelines, I ensured future implementation to be streamlined.

New MOD's desktop mockup
New MOD's mobile order home page
New MOD's create-your-own page
New MOD's create-your-own mobile page
"With the right dev resources, I want to build the experience right away."
Kevin Flaherty
Vice President - Digital Marketing, MOD Pizza

So, How Did It Look?

It looked delicious! Overall, we were successful in swaying the users to choose fewer toppings. Particularly, our participants loved the quick Add-to-Cart button as it allowed them to spend more time with the MOD’s classic pizzas. 70% of our test participants liked the disclaimer pop-up and stated that they would consider following the advice. More importantly, our client from MOD loves the redesign!

As a part-time foodie, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to dig my teeth into a restaurant's problem. After unboxing MOD's problem, I've learned to spin a business problem into a design challenge. As a designer, I honed my communication skills to heighten my creative choices to clients and even teammates.

When product launch comes, I would have really liked to have more eyes on our prototype and conduct a few more rounds of usability testing. I’m interested to see how much more we can fine-tune our designs. Additionally, exploring new ways to incentivize the user to create an account — grabbing more conversions for MOD.

‍Overall, it was a great experience to be a part of a problem space I was not aware of before; and working with such a small team to bring light to it.

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Project Credits

Research: Shane Massey
Prototyping: Christye Watkins

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