Menu App
Replacing paper menus and phone calls with a seamless digital ordering experience.
Overview
Cache is the flagship product of Platform Technologies PLC — a digital room service and food ordering system for Ethiopian hotels. The app lets hotel guests browse menus, place orders, pay online, and track delivery from their phone, replacing the physical menu, phone-based ordering, and cash-only payment that dominated the market.
I joined as UX Designer during a period of competitive urgency: Platform Technologies needed to ship Cache before a competitor launched a similar product. This shaped the entire design process — tight timelines, fast iteration, and a premium on decisions that were both good design and fast to build.
0
Phone calls to order
3
Major iterations
+
Online payment added
🏆
Shipped before competitor
The Problem
Ethiopian hotels relied almost entirely on paper menus and phone-based room service. The guest experience was slow and friction-filled — menus were often out of date, ordering required calling the front desk and hoping someone picked up, and cash was the only payment option.
For hotel staff, the situation was equally chaotic: handwritten orders, verbal miscommunications with the kitchen, and no centralised view of what was being ordered or when it was expected to arrive.
“The brief wasn't just "make a digital menu." It was to redesign the entire ordering loop — from first tap to food at the door — and make it feel as effortless as ordering from Uber Eats, but built for an Ethiopian hotel context.”
Design Process
Reviewed the existing room service process at partner hotels with Platform Technologies' team. Mapped the full guest and staff journey to identify where friction was highest — ordering, payment, and communication emerged as the three critical pain points that needed to be solved first.
Audited food ordering apps for mental model patterns: Uber Eats for ordering flow, Marriott Bonvoy for room service experience, and local Ethiopian apps for context on what patterns users were already familiar with. The goal was to build on existing mental models rather than invent new ones.
Lo-fi wireframes of the full guest journey — browse, customise, cart, checkout, track. Shared with Platform Technologies' team for feedback before moving to high fidelity. The wireframe stage is where the flat list → category tabs change and the multi-screen checkout → 2-step checkout simplification were identified.
Built the full mobile UI in Figma. Delivered a complete component library (cards, buttons, inputs, modals, nav patterns) with annotated specifications. The component library was designed for speed: minimal bespoke elements, maximum reuse.
Design Decisions
Menu display
The initial design showed all menu items in a scrollable list. Feedback from the hotel team made clear that guests couldn't orient themselves. The final design uses a category-tab navigation (Starters / Mains / Drinks / Desserts) with item cards showing name, price, key ingredients, and a photo thumbnail.
Ordering flow
The first flow had too many screens between adding an item and confirming the order. The revised flow introduced a persistent cart drawer accessible from anywhere in the menu, and a streamlined 2-step checkout (review cart → confirm). Returning guests can reorder with a single tap from their history.
Online payment
Online payment was not in the original scope. Feedback from hotel partners made clear it was non-negotiable — guests increasingly expected digital payment, and cash-on-delivery alone was a reason not to use the app. Payment was added as a core feature: mobile money and room-charge options, cleanly integrated into checkout.
Outcome
Cache shipped within the competitive window — Platform Technologies brought the product to market before their competitor. The design became the foundation of Platform Technologies' hospitality product line, with the component library and design system continuing to be used for subsequent iterations.
The project taught an important lesson about design under pressure: constraints are not the enemy of good design. The competitive deadline forced clear thinking about what mattered — and the result was a product that did a small number of things extremely well.