Tax-free meal allowance accounting platform for businesses & restaurants.
Newlunch is a startup that I co-founded in 2021. We connect businesses and employees with local restaurants. The connection via a common software platform enables a fully digital and automated process of meal subsidization as well as a modern solution for employee catering that benefits all parties involved. In addition to an appealing and simple benefit for companies and employees, it is also our goal to offer restaurants an online presence and visibility at fair conditions without disproportionate commissions from established online ordering platforms.
My main task in the startup was to identify user requirements of the various applications and to design a fully comprehensive SaaS platform based on user and market research. As the project progressed, I focused primarily on frontend development and implemented the UI designs myself.
1 Designer, 1 Product Owner and a team of developers.
The purpose of NewLunch is to turn the lunch break into an actual experience and to offer a benefit that is perceived by employees not only in monetary terms, but also as a real benefit. For this purpose, a SaaS platform was designed and developed with one application each for companies, employees and restaurants, bringing companies and employees closer together with local restaurants.
Figma, Adobe CC, React JS, Tailwind, Jira, Github
Meal vouchers are a popular benefit among companies and employees. With the cashless meal allowance, employers can subsidize their employees' lunch or dinner with up to €6.67 in Germany. Paper meal vouchers from providers such as Sodexo or Edenred, which can be redeemed like cash at certain points of acceptance, are the most popular.
Digital solutions for the billing of meal allowances have been permitted in Germany since 2016. Employees receive a tax-free refund of up to 100 euros with their next paycheck. Basically, the benefit is like an expense report, where a receipt is submitted and a portion is reimbursed. The big advantage: hardly any effort on the part of the company and receipts can be submitted from any restaurant, supermarket or café.
Submitting expenses is an annoying and time-consuming affair for many employees. Our first goal was to make the meal allowance as simple, fast and intuitive as possible. A mobile app for employees should help with this.
On the home screen, both ways to redeem a meal ticket are prominently placed on the page: submitting receipts and ordering food from partner restaurants.
In addition, selected lunch offers from our partner restaurants are presented on the home page based on the user location.
An integrated map can also be used to explore restaurants, cafes and supermarkets in the area. The map is another convenient and efficient way to find the particular restaurant where you want to pre-order or submit a receipt.
Food voucher credit always in mind
Under tax law, a maximum of 15 meal vouchers per month can be redeemed in Germany. With physical paper vouchers, employees therefore receive 15 meal vouchers per month.
In the NewLunch app, employees receive their meal vouchers in digital form. These tokens are prominently displayed on the top right of every page as a credit badge, so that employees know their food voucher credit at all times. Similar to a credit system used as a gamification method, the credit score is intended to increase motivation to use food stamps.
For the concept and design phase of the restaurant order app I was able to closely collaborate with several gastronomes. The goal of the application was to manage orders easily and clearly despite little time and busy day-to-day business in the restaurant. In addition, the management of the menu should be done via a simple content management. The application was primarily designed for tablets and implemented as a PWA.
Keep it simple
On the home screen, orders can be managed in different statuses, similar to a kanban board. However, only one column can be focused, which is helpful for the kitchen, for example, to display only open orders.
Other subpages, e.g. the CMS (see below) are deliberately created as subpages and are accessible via the burger menu, since the operational business and not the admin functionalities are in the foreground.
Accept new orders easily
New orders are displayed prominently in color on the entire screen. In a busy day-to-day business, an open order should not be overlooked. An order can be confirmed, postponed or rejected at the desired time.
Easy management of the menus
Content management reduced to the essentials. This allows restaurateurs to easily and intuitively create menus with products and schedule them for specific times of day.In the modal is indicated how products with variants and extras can be created as desired and super simple.
The company app is an admin interface for businesses. During conception, I conducted several interviews with people from HR to identify detailed requirements and iteratively evolve the concept. The app provides an overview of deployed meal vouchers and generates a day-by-day export for payroll, removing the administrative burden of employee allowances from the company. Here's a sneak peek at the admin interface.
In order not to expose the entire application, not all screens and flows of the applications can be shown. Overall, the product is currently in a good state and receives positive user feedback. Minor usability issues could already be identified and fixed during development.
The biggest challenges were mainly in the user app. This was designed mobile first, but the web application, which was implemented as a PWA, was also supposed to work responsively on the desktop, which made the design, but especially the development, significantly more complex.
The various interfaces for the different user groups were time-consuming, but also a great challenge to work user-centered. Due to my dual role of designer and developer, in combination with a certain time pressure that comes with being a young startup, some design decisions could not be tested sufficiently with users.
