BCG Event App Service

Four markets, four separately-built ordering apps, no shared standard. One audit that turned that into a single journey — and a £500M opportunity.

Company

The Boston Consulting Group

Associate

Role

IT, event planners, service leads, business managers, operational innovation team

Team

Global

Markets

Audit • Competitive research • Synthesis • Customer journey • Presentation

Scope

£500M+

Sales opportunity identified across the four markets

4 → 1

Divergent market experiences aligned to one Nando’s journey

CMO

Level alignment – presented to global brand, tech and the CMO

01 – IMPACT

I aligned four independently-built order at table experiences into one journey, creating a shared standard to invest in across markets, and a clear view of which features moved revenue for order at table.

Role

I owned the audit, competitive research, recommendations, and synthesis end-to-end, including shaping deck narratives with the client given the internal sensitivity, and presenting directly to the global team — brand, tech, and CMO — to land executive alignment. Our UX Director joined to present to a broader stakeholder readout.

I built a strong relationship with the client. When I moved on to another project, the client asked for me back.

02 – SETUP

  1. A brand problem — consistency, recognizably Nando's, across markets.

  2. A revenue opportunity — increase basket size, purchase frequency, recency, and personalization, surfaced once we dug in.

The brief was two-fold:

I partnered early with the client's brand lead and tech lead to get the inside scoop on how the restaurants are actually designed — the curated playlists that shift with time of day, the African art built into every location, the psychology of being hangry and needing to choose fast from a menu with a lot of options. None of that is visible to a customer scrolling an app, but it shaped every recommendation that followed.

03 – PROCESS

Part 0: Lived experience helps me close the distance between me and the problem – something unattained from analyzing flows and data.

I dined at the restaurant with our client to embody the customer and understand the full context and environment:

Felt the wait time

Realized customer awareness of order at table relied on staff cues

Allergies and customizations were not covered in the app

Group ordering felt clunky and pressured

Music followed the rhythm of the restaurant – slower during lulls and faster in busier times

Part 1: The full audit – analyzing each market against best practice

Went market by market, screen by screen, analyzing and scoring each against:

  • Usability

  • Functionality and navigation

  • Brand

I averaged these into an overall rating on the Nando’s Peri-o-meter.

This version went to the global team, and it was genuinely sensitive, close to marking each market’s homework.

Same audit, reworked for the markets themselves rather than the global team. No grade this time.

Categories expanded (experience design, content, navigation, functionality) and everything reframed as a specific opportunity per screen, per market: something each market could actually act on.

Part 2: Sanitized and actionable

Recommendations moved from a list into the actual journey, placed exactly where they’d land as someone orders.

Part 3: Into the journey, then the synthesis

Tags are the clean example: not instinctive enough across markets, so we explained why tagging mattered, then pointed to best-in-class for what good looks like.

That fed the final move: a “Frankenstein” journey, the best ideas from all markets plus patterns borrowed from best-in-class (Sweetgreen, Airbnb), combined into one new, cohesive customer journey.

04 – AI IN THE WORKFLOW

Across four markets, this project generated a huge volume of qualitative feedback from 17 stakeholders. Analyzing that much material by hand would have taken weeks.

Using AI — Figma’s Jambot powered by ChatGPT — to synthesize it into themes let me move much faster. But more than that, it let me go deeper: spotting patterns across markets I'd have missed skimming transcripts alone, and freeing up time to sit with what actually mattered and sharpen my judgment on what to prioritize and how to frame it back to stakeholders.

05 – CLOSE

Bringing clarity and creating a direction that let everyone else build what is ahead

The audit, recommendations, and direction setting it produced fed directly into Nando's business strategy for the period ahead: a structured view of where each market was falling short, recommendations to improve the order-at-table experience, and a clear set of prioritized next steps.

IF I DID IT AGAIN TODAY

Visualize the recommendations. Concepting what each change looks like for Nando's specifically would have made the recommendations land harder than reference examples alone.

Pair the embodied experience with customer research. Talking to actual diners and pushing an incentivised survey through the apps would have grounded the findings in real customer data, in addition my own observations of the experience.

Define success metrics upfront. Building measurement into the recommendations would let Nando's track how much of the £500 million opportunity they're capturing over time.

  • Share of all orders placed on order-at-table

  • Basket size difference between orders placed at the counter and order-at-table

  • Repeat order-at-table rate in a specific time period to confirm if behavior changed