Background
This one started at TGI Fridays. I was having dinner with my family when the table next to us descended into the familiar chaos of small children refusing to choose from a menu. Somewhere between courses, the idea arrived: what if the kids designed their own food?
I shaped it into an app for both settings, at the restaurant table and ordering takeaway from home. I hung the concept on Domino’s, since I built it during the peak of Covid when restaurants were shut and takeaway was dinner.
The work
The app had to be genuinely entertaining for children, not a grown-up’s form with a cartoon on it. So I gave it a host: a robot character called DomBot, Dom for short, who guides kids through the experience with animations and voice prompts, and gently talks up the healthier choices along the way.
The core interaction is wonderfully simple. Ingredients sit in bowls; kids drag and drop them onto the pizza however they like. No rules, no fixed positions. When the order goes through to the nearest store, the staff do their best to recreate the masterpiece exactly as designed.
The result
I knew from the start this wasn’t heading to an app store, and that freed it up to be the best version of itself. The discipline still had to be real though: I held the design to platform OS guidelines throughout, and the process stretched me in areas client work rarely reaches. Concept projects earn their keep that way. This one I’m particularly fond of.