Giving restaurants a self-serve way to communicate with guests
STARTER is a B2B2C platform for restaurants. It powers branded apps and websites where guests can order food, discover promotions, and use loyalty programmes. Restaurant owners, managers, and marketers work in its admin tools.
Restaurants needed a simple way to talk about promotions, menu launches, and events. A banner had too little room; a well-made landing page often required a designer. We introduced Stories as a familiar guest-facing format, but designed it as a durable product capability rather than an expiring social post.
As the lead designer, I was responsible for research, UX, and art direction across the guest app, website, and admin panel. Another designer produced the guest-facing and admin interfaces under my direction. I also worked with a product manager and the engineering team.
Establishing what the first release needed
I began by looking at how STARTER clients already communicated with their guests: what they published in banners and information pages, which themes recurred, and where the existing formats fell short.
I then reviewed 23 apps and several websites. I compared entry points, phone and desktop behaviour, in-story actions, and aspect ratios.
The research set four requirements for the first release:
- A fixed 9:16 format rather than stretching content to fill the screen, so one asset works predictably across devices.
- An action link on every slide.
- The ability to share a Story.
- Reactions or comments could be useful later, but were not essential to launch.
The important reference was not only social media. Inside a product, a Story can remain useful beyond a day and serve a concrete restaurant need: explaining an offer, introducing a menu, or inviting guests to an event.
Based on client requests and the research, we kept three hypotheses to test:
- Restaurants could communicate more often and more clearly without investing in a new content format.
- A familiar format could lower the barrier to publishing and help restaurants explain promotions, events, and launches.
- Richer communication could help guests decide whether to place a first order.
Making publishing clear for restaurant marketers
Together with the product manager, I interviewed the lead marketer and operations manager of a restaurant group with three locations and four brands. They were active users of banners and information pages, so they could clearly describe the limits of the existing tools.
The interview showed that:
- Maintaining expiring content across several brands would be too demanding.
- Existing communication tools were not flexible enough, and pop-ups did not always work predictably.
- Marketers needed analytics to understand content performance.
- The client was concerned about website and app performance.
- When a marketer starts building a campaign, its copy and core assets are normally already available.
After the interview, I mapped the marketer’s journey from idea to publication. It informed the admin-panel structure and separated what was essential to launch from later improvements.
Integrating Stories into the guest experience
The home screen already contained three banner types: banners could open a modal, an information page, or any external link. Stories needed to fit this established pattern while remaining recognisable as a sequence of screens.
We explored several markers. An inner border covered content, and labels added noise. An outer border was the quietest option: it identifies a banner with Stories without changing the creative itself. Standard banners remain unmarked.
We tested the marker across every banner type and a range of client assets.
We also adapted the viewer for desktop and mobile web. On desktop, the action is part of the slide, so it stays associated with its specific content while a guest progresses through the sequence. On mobile, the same placement works around the browser chrome.
An editor that previews the published result
For the admin experience, I studied Frisbuy and 2GIS. Both addressed a similar challenge: letting businesses assemble a sequence of assets without turning the product into a complex design tool.
The first version of our editor was too sprawling. Settings, slide ordering, and the preview competed for attention.
We did not need to reproduce a social-media visual editor. Marketers upload prepared images and video, then control order, the action link, and publication. I therefore organised the chosen direction around the active slide: slides form a horizontal sequence, with settings next to the selected item.
The editor mirrors the result a guest will see. A marketer can immediately check the sequence and ensure no interface element covers important imagery.
Settings sit around the active slide, while the larger horizontal sequence makes the final structure visible as it is assembled.
Managing published Stories
For published Stories, we used a table. It shows live and draft content, the archive, core indicators, placement, and creation date; marketers can copy a link or archive a Story from the same place.
We designed the creation, publishing, and management states, then handed the solution over for development. People with very different levels of experience use the admin panel, so the flow needed to work without separate training.
What the launch showed
More than half of STARTER’s top 30 clients launched their own Stories in the first week. Early examples included Fresa’s and DUO.
During the first month, support received no questions about how to use the feature. This was an early signal that restaurants could create and publish the new content format independently.
The initial release tested feature adoption and interface clarity. Its effect on orders, revenue, or loyalty would have required a longer observation window and sufficient data, so I do not claim those outcomes here.
