Deligram is a technology-enabled retail company addressing the friction of shopping, online and offline, through a hybrid, localized model of omnichannel commerce.
Deligram had spent a long time building out its backend, inventory, delivery, and the operational backbone of the business. But customer acquisition channels had been left waiting far too long. There was a website, but no Android or iOS app. Before investing in a full app development team, the business needed something faster.
My role was focused on making the team more customer-centered: improving engagement, strengthening partner relationships, and finding quick, practical solutions to problems the internal team, customers, and partners were all facing.
The fastest answer wasn't a native app. It was a lightweight, mobile-optimized website with an app-like feel, built quickly by the existing team. We paired it with an Android app that loaded the same experience through web views, giving Deligram a real mobile presence without the cost or timeline of full native development.
The app-like designs were first built for the mobile site, and eventually became Deligram's mobile-first storefront: category browsing, product listings, and the product detail page.
The product page carried the same catalog whether a customer arrived through the app, the website, or an agent point, one experience across every channel.
One of the sharper problems was reaching customers who weren't going to download an app at all. I designed a phone-order system built around a revised Deligram kiosk placed at agent points, holding a physical product catalog. A customer could call in, reference a product code from the catalog, and place an order without ever touching a screen. Delivery routed to their chosen agent point using a matching agent code.
The system needed a reliable way to identify both people and places without any digital account behind it. I designed a coding structure using the first letter of the user type (Agent, Vendor, Delivery, or Customer) combined with a randomly generated alphanumeric ID, a scheme capable of supporting up to 165 million unique IDs. Simple enough to read off a phone call, robust enough to scale.
Not the usual UX design work — something built for a real, practical world. The kiosk catalog and coding structure behind the phone-order system.
Deligram's agent network still ran on a manual, offline process for collecting agent information and documentation, slow and hard to scale. I designed an onboarding flow through the Deligram Agent app that let anyone interested in becoming an agent register directly: entering shop details, location, and average sales, and submitting a trade license image, all from their phone. It was meant to replace a paperwork-heavy process with something an agent could complete on their own in minutes, while still capturing what Deligram needed to review and approve them.
The last thing I designed at Deligram: the Agent app's self-serve onboarding flow.
It was a really short time, ended before it was started. When I left Deligram, the pandemic was knocking at the door, with big turmoil ahead. It wasn't a great time to leave, but I also wasn't in the controlling chair.
What followed still sits oddly with me. The pandemic turned out to be a boom time for e-commerce almost everywhere, but Deligram went the other way, scaling operations down, shrinking the team, and eventually closing the business roughly a year after I left.
It's a hard outcome to square with what the company had going for it: one of the sharpest teams I've worked with, real backing, and a strong outlook at the time. I still think about it occasionally, and I don't have a clean answer for what went wrong.