James Bagley
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Startup · 0-to-1 Product + UX

A pickup experience that works across people, software, and hardware

Designing a faster pickup experience across the physical and digital journey.

  • 0-to-1
  • Service Design
  • Physical + Digital
Two Lavii team members using a smart food locker with a touchscreen and QR scanner
People

Pickup in under ten seconds, with no instructions needed.

Hardware + software

Locker states and order states had to stay in sync.

Service experience

Move complexity to the right layer

Smart food locker in service
My role
Product direction, service design, UX/UI, creative direction, and startup operations.
Scope
0-to-1 startup product · physical + digital service experience
Context
Featured · Startup · 0-to-1 Product + UX

01 — THE SITUATION

Where the work started.

Lavii aimed to make restaurant and delivery pickup safer, more secure, and dramatically faster using smart food lockers.

Customer

Needs a fast, obvious, low-friction pickup experience.

Operator

Needs visibility into orders, lockers, status, and exceptions.

System

Needs the physical locker and software to stay in sync.

The digital experience and physical locker behavior had to function as one coordinated system.

03 — THE REFRAME

The locker wasn’t the experience. The system around it was.

THE REQUEST

Design the interface for a smart food locker.

The starting point focused on the visible interaction with the locker.

WHAT BECAME CLEAR

The experience depended on customers, restaurant staff, software, notifications, and physical hardware working together.

A good pickup experience required the entire system to stay understandable, coordinated, and reliable.

02 — Understanding the system

Understanding the system

THE PICKUP JOURNEY

  1. 01
    Order placed
  2. 02
    Order prepared
  3. 03
    Locker assigned
  4. 04
    Customer notified
  5. 05
    Customer arrives
  6. 06
    Locker opens
  7. 07
    Pickup confirmed

WHO AND WHAT IT RUNS ON

  • CustomerOrders, gets notified, arrives, and retrieves the food.
  • Restaurant / operatorPrepares the order and hands it to a locker.
  • Software / platformAssigns lockers, sends notifications, tracks state.
  • Locker hardwareHolds the order, verifies pickup, and opens on cue.
End-to-end pickup journey and the four surfaces it depends on.

Seeing the system clearly

The end-to-end pickup journey, from order placed to locker emptied.

The actor ecosystem: customer, restaurant staff, delivery driver, and operator.

Move complexity to the right layer

04 — PRODUCT DIRECTION

What that meant for the product

Each insight translated into a clearer product decision.

Pickup had to work without instructions.

Make the interaction obvious at a glance.

Customers needed confidence the correct locker would open.

Provide clear identity, status, and confirmation cues.

Staff needed to manage exceptions.

Give operators visibility and clear recovery paths.

Software and hardware states had to stay aligned.

Design around real system status, not only ideal flows.

05 — DESIGNING THE EXPERIENCE

One experience, multiple touchpoints.

The same product decisions expressed across the locker, the customer’s phone, the in-store tablet, and the operator dashboard.

01

Arriving & identifying

The locker face in service: a touchscreen prompt, a scan target, and clearly labeled compartments.

Arrival is the moment with the least patience, so identity and next action had to read instantly from a few feet away — no instructions, no menus.

Two people using a Lavii smart food locker with a touchscreen and QR scanner
Locker hardware
02

Opening the locker

A customer at the locker, phone ready, with a prepared order waiting in an open compartment.

The door opening is the promise being kept, so every surface leads to one unambiguous state: this locker, this order, now open.

Customer holding a phone at a Lavii smart food locker, with an open compartment and a prepared order inside
Locker interaction
03

Managing orders

The in-store tablet where staff create an order, assign it to a locker, and hand it off during peak service.

Customer simplicity is produced here, so the operator surface favors large targets, a short queue view, and one obvious action per order.

Tablet prototype of the Lavii order management app showing pending orders and a create-order modal
Operator tablet
04

Handling exceptions

The operator dashboard: locker states, dwell time, pending handoffs, and completed pickups in one view.

Trust depends on the failure states, so the dashboard surfaces real system status — stuck orders, late pickups, unavailable lockers — with a recovery path attached.

Lavii operator dashboard with locker status grid, pickup metrics, and order tables
Operator dashboard

Wider experience

Exploring the wider experience

User persona document for Mason Grey, a restaurant owner, with goals, needs, pain points, and motivations
Customer & operator researchWho the system had to serve.
Wireframe of the Lavii operator dashboard showing locker status grid, pending orders, and recently completed orders
WireframeEarly structure for status and exceptions.

06 — DECISIONS & OUTCOME

Key decisions

The product direction came from a few clear commitments about how the system should work.

01

Design for the full pickup journey, not just the screen

The experience began at the order and ended at an empty locker.

02

Make system status visible

Customers and staff both needed to trust what the system was doing.

03

Design for customers and operators together

Customer speed was produced by the operator workflow behind it.

04

Create recovery paths for when the ideal flow breaks

Real service conditions decided whether the system felt reliable.

The result

What changed

01

A clearer end-to-end service model.

02

A simpler, more understandable pickup experience.

03

Stronger operator visibility.

04

A more coherent relationship between hardware and software.

The simplest customer experiences are often supported by the most thoughtful systems behind them.

More work