Nashville’s oldest candy bar, now with a new way to order it.
- Role
- Creative direction, project management & UX/UI
- Client
- Goo Goo Cluster
- Tools
- Figma, Adobe CC
Summary
Goo Goo Cluster’s downtown Nashville shop let people design their own candy bar and watch it get made in front of them. You’d choose a chocolate shell, sweet fillings, and add-ins, and a few minutes later it was yours.
The one clumsy step was ordering. You filled out a paper form in pencil and handed it across the counter. A local agency brought me in to fix that, and to lead the team doing it.
The idea
Ordering should feel like playing.
We documented the ordering flow around the same steps that made it fun in person: choose your chocolate shell, stack your sweet fillings, add your add-ins, and name what you made. One of the finished screens lets you title your creation.
Leading the build
A small but mighty team.
The agency hired me to lead a small, but amazing, group of designers and developers, and a project manager keeping us to a three-month timeline. My job was to hold the whole thing together, the front-end experience, the design decisions, and the handoff into the kitchen’s existing ticketing system. It was tricky, to say the least.
On a project like this I’d normally build priority guides and wireframes off a fully documented flow before designing. This one was mostly an ordering engine with few content pages, and the clock was short, so I skipped the priority guides and moved straight from wireframes into design. That kept the team focused on UX while still hitting the tight deadline.
The system
iPad first, ready for mobile.
We built it iPad-first, since it would live on tablets in the store, then made it responsive for mobile so Goo Goo could extend it later without a rebuild.
The flow moves in three steps, shell, fillings, add-ins, with a running preview of the candy taking shape and the price updating as you go. At the end you get an order summary and an approximate wait time, so you know when to come back to the counter.
