Barilla:
experience strategy to promote a healthy mediterranean diet and enhance restaurant loyalty
for barilla, Italy & us
user research
customer experience strategy
journey mapping
mobile app concept
wireframing
Project: Customer experience strategy for Barilla’s US restaurant chain, with an emphasis on digital loyalty.
Goal and Problem statement: Barilla’s loyalty program was a traditional punch-card system. It was disconnected to the brand, and underutilized by the customers. Furthermore, Barilla’s heritage in mediterranean diet was found nowhere on the restaurant experience.
Hardest challenge in the project was convincing Barilla to shift from their original nutritional tracking app idea to new concepts rooted in user insights.
Process: To understand the current customer experience, we started the 7 week program by conducting customer and staff interviews. Participatory design exercises with customers provided insights which we used for fast concept iterations with clients. To let Barilla team grasp insights, we conducted ideation workshops.
My role and responsibilities: I co-led this project with an Associate Director. I planned and conducted research in NY; worked with Milan team to run the workshops. I created and prototyped the final concept in collaboration with a visual designer and another interaction designer.
Project highlights
Research to understand food & restaurant related habits, and test initial concept
Client was solely focused on their initial idea for a nutritional tracking app with loyalty. When we ran this by users through research, it quickly became obvious that users did not see how a restaurant chain would be relevant for tracking their nutrition holistically. The visits to the restaurant were not frequent enough nor did users felt deep enough connection with the brand.
We also wanted to gather insights around food habits that we could use to ideate with: what made people choose one type of meal/restaurant, were people more habitual during the week, how does being at work affected food choices etc. These insights helped us create meaningful user archetypes and concepts, and to bring along the client to a new direction.
2. experience mapping and concept co-creation to bring along the client
Even though it showed low possibility of user acceptance, client was still tied to their original nutritional tracking idea. To make them embrace the learning from the field, we conducted a co-creation session.
For this exercise, we created 4 user archetypes (based on field research and user surveys). We used experience maps of the user journey to immerse everyone in the restaurant user journey. I proposed to run ideation around key moments, which let us go deeper.
Next, we distilled the large amount of ideas into 4 concepts. Each highlighting different strengths of the Barilla experience, infused with a variety of digital loyalty tactics.
3. Final concept highlighting gamified loyalty and Mediterranean diet inspirations
We focused on a mobile app concept that highlighted Mediterranean nutrition via flavors of the Barilla dishes.
I proposed and designed micro challenges to gamify loyalty aspect. Users were given nutrition related challenges to try brand new flavors, eat different food groups from the Mediterranean diet. These micro challenges boosted users’ loyalty points alongside traditional visits.