Delivery apps

TimelyDelivered — food and grocery delivery apps

Four apps that share one order story: the customer phone app, the restaurant kitchen tablet, the shop seller app, and the office control panel — for a business that delivers both meals and groceries.

Client: TimelyDelivered
Year: 2025
Timeline: Designed in phases across four apps
What we built: Customer phone appKitchen tabletShop seller appOffice control panel

The challenge

Food delivery looks simple from the couch. Tap a meal, pay, wait for a knock. Behind that tap, five different people have to stay in sync on the same order — and each of them holds a different device in a different kind of hurry.

The customer wants clear menus, a cart that does not fight them, and a live sense of where the bag is. The restaurant needs loud, hard-to-miss new orders on a tablet next to the fryer, a simple way to mark “cooking” then “ready for the driver,” and a one-tap way to say an item is sold out. Marketplace shops need to open and close for the day, keep prices and stock honest, and see what they are owed. Drivers need clean handoffs. And someone in the office has to watch users, restaurants, shops, disputes, fees, and content without opening twelve different tools.

If each of those screens is designed as its own little product, the order breaks at the handoff. A kitchen marks ready while the customer still sees “preparing.” A shop sells an item that is already gone. Support cannot find who owns the complaint. That is the problem we set out to solve for TimelyDelivered: one shared path for every order, four apps that still feel natural to the person holding them.

What we did

We started by drawing the path of a single order — from the first open of the app to money settled at the end of the day. Then we designed each screen for the person actually holding the device, not for a generic “user.”

Colours stay TimelyDelivered’s own orange, green, and blue. This is their product, not a Sky High template with a logo swap. The sections below walk through each app and how the pieces stay tied together so a cook, a shop clerk, and a customer never have to guess what happened next.

The customer phone app

Hungry people do not want a product tour. They want food or groceries, then out. The customer app opens with a clear welcome, then Food and Grocery side by side so nobody hunts for the right catalogue. Restaurant menus, a cart with promo codes, card and wallet payment, a short sign-in when needed, and tracking after checkout.

We kept labels short and buttons big. Login and create-account are obvious. If something fails, the message should say what to do next — not show a code only a developer understands. Think of a good takeaway counter: get the order right the first time, then stay out of the way.

The restaurant kitchen tablet

A cook cannot dig through menus while tickets pile up. The partner app is built for glance-and-tap: a live board of new orders, cooking, and ready for the driver. Sound matters — a new order has to cut through kitchen noise. Staff can print to the kitchen, mark items sold out, and see how the day is going without leaving the board.

Status words match how kitchens already talk: new, preparing, ready. No diagrams on the glass. If an item runs out at 8pm on a Friday, one toggle should stop new customers ordering it before the next ticket lands. That is the difference between a tablet that helps service and a tablet that becomes another chore.

Shops on the marketplace

Grocery and specialty shops are not restaurants. They need store setup, open and closed for the day, categories, strike-through pricing when they run a deal, stock that matches what is on the shelf, and a clear door into payouts and fees. The seller app is that storefront in a pocket or on a counter tablet.

We treated honest stock as part of the design, not a later office problem. Wrong stock is how a marketplace burns trust with the shop and the customer in one bad evening. A bakery or corner grocer should be able to open the app in the morning, flip to open, and trust that what customers see is what they can actually sell.

The office control panel

Someone still has to run the network. The office web panel gathers people, drivers, restaurants, shop categories, orders, support and disputes, money in and money out (fees, payouts, commissions), day-to-day numbers, site content, and system health in one sidebar. More than a dozen tools, one login.

This is the screen for the person who gets the angry call at 10pm. They should find the order, the shop, and the fee line without asking a developer to “check the system.” Charts and totals are there to answer simple questions: how is today going, who is owed what, where did this order stall?

One order, five roles

Customer, restaurant, shop, driver, and office staff all touch the same order path. Design’s job was to make the handoffs boring — in a good way. When the kitchen marks ready, the next person in line should see it without a phone call. When money moves, the office panel and the seller’s finance screen should tell the same story.

We did not invent clever names for statuses. We used the words the business already uses on the floor. That is how a kebab shop owner, a bakery counter, or a grocery clerk can pick up the tablet on day one and keep working — without a glossary taped to the wall.