FELFEL

FELFEL offers a fresh food subscription for organisations – at offices, hospitals or schools. The service consists of delivering freshly produced food on a daily basis to the FELFEL fridge. The food is exclusively produced by small, independent and local businesses. Whatever cannot be sold is donated for distribution at food banks.

At the core of the service is “the FELFEL”, which is the name of the smart fridge. I joined the company as a product designer and product owner for UX, so my job is to enable our users to get food out of the FELFEL. With traditional vending machines, you pay anonymously (with cash or card) and then a singular product gets dispensed (or stuck). With FELFEL, once you badge in, the whole fridge opens and you can take out whatever you like.

The interaction is fundamentally different to other vending machines since it is based on trust: We trust you not to empty the whole fridge and you trust us by setting up a FELFEL account. The problem was that when I joined… it wasn’t working: An account could only be set up by someone internal to the the company; it was not clear how to operate the smart fridge; and the existing App was pretty much unusable. (There was an older, physical badging system that worked instead, but that relied on handing out an NFC tag to literally every user.)

I completely redesigned the user journey from first contact at the fridge, to setting up the FELFEL Badge on our companion app (iOS and Android) via a QR code on the fridge, to engaging the customer after being a customer for a long time. My rather broad activities included performed large amounts of UX research, A/B testing, conceptualising and winning support for new features, taking over the design of most digital products (not the public website), coding parts of our applications in our React stack, dong physical product design (CAD) and creating new parts for the product, being the first Product team hire and building that team, doing anything from rapid prototyping to small series manufacturing rounds and managing roadmaps and development projects.

Some of my highlights at FELFEL:

• Research, design and product management for all digital and physical touchpoints incl. the iOS and Android apps, the IoT-enabled vending machines and several web apps
• Cracking the 1’000 FELFEL benchmark!! You can find them all over Switzerland.
• Growing the mobile app user base by 500% to 100k users and replacing the clunky physical badge
• Helped transitioning the company from the start-up phase to commercial success in its own, new market segment. The concept has been copied several times in the meantime.
• Redesigned the App to be state-of-the-art with features such as social login, BLE-based authentication at the smart fridge, push notifications, etc. (in collaboration with Apps with Love)
• Redesigned the smart fridge interface to be prettier :’)
• Reduced the time to badge in at the FELFEL from ca. 20 seconds (QR code) to 5 seconds (Bluetooth)
• 3D modelling, testing and sending off to series production a sensor terminal for the newly launched Gavetti coffee machine service
• Cocreating a design system (in collaboration with Apps with Love) that ensures that FELFEL has clear and reusable design guidelines for all its digital touchpoints
• Organising a FELFEL team to participate at the Climathon Zürich and winning one of the prizes for an incentive system to transition customers to eat more climate-friendly
• Going to various sustainability-related conferences to learn more about where the big carbon impacts occur (TLDR: food)
• Launching Gavetti, a completely new coffee service
• Acting as a Product Owner for UX topics and guiding our talented Tech team in what to develop next

As I am still working at FELFEL, here are some (unsorted and random) impressions in a gallery. This can take a while to load…