New Pizza Chef
with Augmented Reality™
iOS | Android | Mac
Bringing the mundane task of customising a pizza to life in a joyous explosion of colour and fun in this groundbreaking, award-winning AR experience built in partnership with Deloitte.
Research
Towards the end of 2019 there was interest in the business around exploring gamification, and the concept of an augmented reality experience was floated as a stand-alone app akin to Pokemon Go.
Focus groups and user research lead us to an experience that was more core to the process of ordering pizza - that enhanced the somewhat tedious task of customising the product by putting your pizza on the surface in front of you.
Rather than being stand-alone, this new experience would be integrated directly into the ordering platform.
Design
With a short, 6-month turnaround time, and Deloitte Digital handling development, New Pizza Chef would also be the first place in the Domino’s app where the Next Generation user interface would be implemented. Core conceits such as the card-metaphor based UI and new universal navigation colours were adapted for the AR experience, with a new swipe-navigable ingredient picker added to keep all customisations under the user’s thumb. Adding or removing an ingredient was a single, seamless gesture.
For hardware that didn’t support ARKit (or for users who didn’t feel like assembling a pizza on their bathroom floor) a toggle was added to turn off the camera, and display a neutral background. Detail was focused on, with an eye to how animations effectively communicated customisations to the product and had an element of tactility and joy. Custom Easter Egg 2D animations were created for specific ingredients that encouraged users to explore and have fun.
Joy is often a hard to quantify metric, but it was always an understanding that New Pizza Chef should exude it.
Deployment
Released as an upgrade to the Domino’s ordering app, New Pizza Chef with Augmented Reality was recognised by International Data Corporation (IDC) in the 2019 Digital Transformation (DX) Awards in the category of Omni Experience Innovator, alongside experiences from Proctor & Gamble, Disney and Citi Group.
It went on to win overall winner for its category, globally.
More importantly, it was a beloved feature - repeatedly called out in reviews by our customers as surprisingly great, fun to use experience.
From a business standpoint, customers highlighted that they were encountering ingredients and configurations they hadn’t even been aware of, just by playing with New Pizza Chef - and, more importantly, customers who created a pizza in New Pizza Chef were extremely likely - almost certain - to convert.
With the availability of iOS apps on Mac, New Pizza Chef with Augmented Reality was updated with new, higher resolution textures and arrived as part of the Domino’s app in the Mac App Store.
As of 2023, New Pizza Chef with Augmented Reality is awaiting a return in the next-generation ordering app, with expanded availability across all Domino’s markets.
