We wanted to bring the warm experience of having a home-cooked meal from an Italian grandmother to the working young adult. We think that food is much more than just sustenance: it is comfort, it is experience, and it is to be shared.

In order to achieve our main value proposition, we would need to create trust between the cook and customer/user. With several months of market research, particularly based on AirBnb's early day challenges, we concluded that the biggest UX challenge would be signaling to the customer that, at the very least, they could safely eat the food this stranger was preparing for them. Bridging this gap would require making a sense of trust inherent to the interface itself.

This allowed us to identify our first assumption: we must focus on building the relationship between a cook and a user. With this in mind, our main priority for design was find a way to put the cook, rather than their food, center stage.

The new feature to be added to this phase of the design was a heightened emphasis on the cook. Our main intention was to not just sell the food but the entire experience. We envisioned a scenario in which a young professional, Michele a 24-year-old man, goes to the cook's house, Nonna Maria's ("nonna" means "grandma" in Italian) after a long day of work to get a Damamma meal. He sits at her table while they chat about each other's days and she loads up a to-go container full of fresh made pasta with care, sweetly scribbles his name on the box, and sends him off.

For this to be even remotely possible we would have to start inventing ways for the user to become interested in the cook themself.

The next strategy to build trust would be to add the food safety handling verification to a cook's profile to signal to the user that the person cooking their food knew best cleanliness practices. In Italy, this certification is called HACCP and we would require every cook to provide proof they had completed their course.

Finally, we added reviews for social proof on the cook profile.

Though we had implemented some features to add trust, we didn't yet have what it took for Damamma to reach product market fit. We needed a minimum love-able product.

We went back to the drawing board, sending out user surveys and asking people questions in the street. Responses confirmed what we had expected - there was just no excitement about ordering food from a stranger.

We asked users what the best restaurant experiences they had and how they were unique. We researched all the best ma-and-pop eateries in the world and tried to figure out what made them special.

We stumbled upon a video that made everything click:

The single thing that makes a customer continue returning to the same eatery is not just good food, but an impactful experience. And that experience is very often centered around the cook themselves.

This allowed us to realize that what Michele, our average user, was searching for was not merely food to fill his belly. He was in search of a character that could show him warmth, brighten up his day, and add value to his life.

With this new discovery, we wanted to do something radical. What if we could make the user "fall" for the cook before they ever saw the food? What if we put the cook in all their glory and quirkiness center stage, more like a social app than your basic food delivery app. We were solving a new problem. In order to solve that problem we needed this app to feel more like a community than an on-demand food service app.

The prototype demonstrates how a user sees a cook's video on the main feed, then can scroll down to see their active dishes and place an order for pickup or delivery.

After implementation, we conducted user tests with a group of 5 users in a mini-launch. While we found that they enjoyed the video feature, they had confusion about the difference between delivery and pickup.

Unfortunately, this turned out to be our very final launch do to the company going under.

If I were to redesign this feature, I would start by running an A/B test to experiment with different wording on buttons. If results were still unclear, I would restructure the interface to hide the calculations until the user selected whether they wanted it delivered or to pick it up.

When approaching cook onboarding, we needed to make the process as frictionless as possible. Without cooks, we would have no product so it was vital to get each new cook setup swiftly.

Unlike other marketplaces in the sharing economy, the cook would need a few more tools before they could get started. On top of having a usable kitchen and a food-handling certificate (HACCP), cooks would need containers and bags to package their food. We had to make sure the online and offline onboarding were completely intertwined.

Breaking down the process into its simplest steps helped to prepare the cook. This was meant to take away the pressure by letting them know what to expect right away. With the final reminder that they would be earning profits too. It also helped us control the experience of the end user, like showing an animation of a personal written note on the sticker to show its intended purpose.

Maintaining brand consistency in the small details not only serves to improve the user experience, but also establishes ethos for the company. I created illustrations based on the physical welcome package for the cooks, down to the containers and stickers. This way the cook knew what to expect with their package.

To increase the likelihood of a cook staying on the platform, we would make them excited by sending them their first 10 containers for free, complete with bags, utensils, and a welcome handbook with everything they needed to know.

We experimented with many types of marketing, but were aware that this product would not reach product-market-fit without a built-in growth feature.

In order to grow, we would need to maximize word-of-mouth marketing. We saw the cooks as a way to make this happen. The cooks already had a reasonable incentive to market themselves, however it wasn't inherently apparent that it would be necessary. This is where the product design played a key role. We came up with the idea to allow the cooks to team together in getting their community by making them leaders.

In order to preserve a consistent design across the entire platform, I set out to build a design language system to document specifications on design. Documentation is also vital when it comes time to scale, providing future designers and developers a cohesive guide.

Choosing an interface typeface, sizes, and use cases.

Unique icons were necessary to maintain consistency across the UI. These are just some of the most commonly occurring interface icons.

Defining repeating components that we called objects and keeping note of where they were used.

We worked on Damamma for more than a year. We gained a total of 300 users, onboarded 90 cooks, had 3 separate launches, ran 4 ad campaigns, and designed 5 versions of the app. In the end, the company did not succeed, but I feel very lucky to have been a part of this team. We both learned a tremendous amount and I owe a lot of my skills to the challenges I overcame while designing, animating, filming, photographing, marketing, social media managing, and conducting user interviews along the way.

To see the official landing page, visit: www.damamma.app.