From Dough to Design
As a well-loved British pizza chain, Pizza Express set out to create a comprehensive loyalty app that rewarded frequent diners and enhanced their overall brand experience. The app needed to seamlessly integrate a range of features: in-restaurant experiences, store locator, educational content, and a complex loyalty program where users could collect pizza slices (stamps) and redeem them for rewards.
As the Visual Designer, working closely with the Design Director, I focused on developing all the UI components, crafting the user flows with the XD team, and ensuring smooth and delightful micro-interactions throughout the app.
My goal was to keep the visual language playful yet functional, using a pizza-slice metaphor to simplify what was essentially a tiered loyalty system similar to frequent flyer programs.
Using pizza slices as a visual metaphor, we brought the experience to life with illustrations of ingredients, restaurant items, and fun, animated interactions, keeping the UI fun and engaging while ensuring clarity and ease of use.
Baking a flexible design system and slicing through complexity
To ensure the app could scale and adapt to future needs, we developed a comprehensive design system, including a robust component library. This design system was built with modularity in mind, providing flexibility for updates and new features while maintaining a consistent visual language across the app.
Working closely with Pizza Express's in-house development team, we ensured every user interaction was intuitive and smooth — from redeeming rewards to checking loyalty status.
We used clean, geometrical shapes throughout the app, from icons to CTAs, maintaining clarity and simplicity. We leveraged Pizza Express’s existing robust and vibrant colour palette to keep the UI visually engaging, allowing us to create a seamless user experience that balanced fun with functionality, ensuring each interaction felt fresh and on-brand.
Serving Up Smiles with Every Tap
The app was carefully designed to deliver moments of delight, much like the satisfaction of taking that first bite of pizza. We kept success screens clean, vibrant, and celebratory. At the same time, more complex interactions — like redeeming rewards — were designed to include more engaging, playful gestures, such as simulating the rip of a ticket when selecting rewards. These micro-interactions added a tactile dimension to the experience, keeping it fun without overwhelming the users. Iconography, illustrations, and animations guided users effortlessly through their loyalty journey, with the UI reflecting progress through playful transformations, like pizzas turning golden or platinum at key milestones.
In every way, the app perfectly brought Pizza Express’s brand to life, blending fun with function and delivering a simple and well-crafted experience.