The Cake app

Timeline: Jan 2019 - Jan 2020     |     Role: Product designer in a startup of 15 people working on a restaurants payments app

Dining? Bookings? Rewards? That and more was CAKE, an app to discover, book, pay and get rewards back for eating out.

Problem

Sometimes going out with a big party could be annoying when the time to pay comes, everyone going through the bill to check their share, asking the waiter or agreeing on the amount to pay... 

Solution

The main goal was to create the smoothest experience for users to open a tab, add friends, pay for their items, split the tab or pay the whole balance and leave the restaurant with 0 hassle. With CAKE users could just pay for items they had and leave the restaurant saying goodbye, there was no need for more interaction with the service, also getting rewarded with credit to later use to pay.

The majority of the creation process and wireframing was done on paper, quicker to validate ideas

As part of a small team, I worked side by side with the apps, front and backend developers everyday. Always working with paper as much as I could to validate the different options before moving to digital.

iOS app

The biggest challenge for us was user retention, the reason why we had to be fast and improve the product as often as possible. Not just with the current product but coming up with new ideas like "Credit". With it we could make users and clients (restaurant owners) happy. A restaurant could offer a cash back option (the user earns a % of their bill back as credit in the app to be used later) to fill those times in the day that venues are empty so they can fill those empty tables and the user gets rewarded.

Cake web

We worked on a two weeks sprint, testing the work every 2 to 4 weeks. The teach team consisted of one iOS dev, one Android dev, one full stack and a senior backend which created a very fast paced environment and a very good connection with developers.

I covered all the needs a start-up can have. From designing the company website to work on the iOS and Android app, shifting around helping marketing with campaigns for new as well as returning users; bringing new ideas live through hackathons… always trying to be one step ahead.

** CAKE was acquired by American Express in October 2017.**

Abraham Guerra @ 2020