Reimagine & Redesign for Yakun Kaya Toast
A full redesign of the mobile ordering experience for one of Singapore's most beloved 80-year-old kopitiams
— building on a promise that the existing app under-delivered on.
Less friction, more kaya toast.
Ya Kun Kaya Toast is an 80-year Singapore institution. Customers' loyalty runs deep — but those who adore the food were silently working around the ordering experience. We set out to rebuild it.
Working in a team of three across two weeks, we redesigned the customer-facing app from the home screen through to order tracking — keeping every decision rooted in the brand's heritage rather than reaching for a generic fast-food template.
UX Research & UI Design.
I led discovery, problem framing, usability testing, and translated findings into the customer flow. I also drove the rationale for design decisions when the team was split — making sure the heritage of Ya Kun stayed in every screen, not just the logo.
15 user interviews. One stubborn pattern.
We started with 15 semi-structured interviews with morning regulars, occasional visitors, and — critically — a handful of actual current app users. Pain points were similar across the board, but they sharpened dramatically once we reached people who'd really tried to order through the existing app.
We mapped the volume and severity of complaints across the cohort. The shape spoke for itself.
Two quotes captured the gap between brand love and product pain:
An 80-year brand, undermined by 8 taps.
Three things customers couldn't do.
Ya Kun customers need a way to order from their seat in order to reduce the number of people physically moving through and congregating in an already cramped store.
Ya Kun customers need to be able to track their order status from their seat in order to know exactly when to get up and collect — because the current number system isn't visible or legible enough from across the store.
Ya Kun customers need a reliable pick-up feature in order to arrive, collect their order, and leave with ease — creating a faster and more pleasant experience than waiting in a physical queue.
Reframing the problem.
From the three statements, three "How Might We" prompts shaped the design.
A full redesign of the mobile ordering experience.
Building on an experience that was promised yet under-delivered on the existing application, we rebuilt three flows end-to-end:
Pick-up for order-ahead regulars, dine-in for the seat-and-order crowd via a tabletop QR, and a unified order-tracking screen that turns the noisy "what's my number" anxiety into a quiet status card you can glance at.
The full app was prototyped in Figma Make and translated into a working build with Claude Code — keeping the existing brand library intact and only adding new components where the old system genuinely couldn't carry the new flow.
From home, to menu, to placed.
The home screen presents two equally-weighted entry points — Pick Up or Dine In — instead of burying one under the other. The category rail on the left of the menu mirrors the way customers already think about a Ya Kun order: set first, then customise.
A quieter way to wait.
The tracking screen replaces the in-store paper number with a calm three-step progress: Order Received → Preparing → Ready for Pickup. Estimated time bands ("8–12 min", "3–5 min") let customers settle into a conversation without checking the counter every 30 seconds.
When the food is up, the status card flips to a green "Your food is waiting!" with a single primary action — Mark as Collected — closing the loop without a counter handoff queue.
What happened when we put it back in front of users.
We ran a usability round with the same cohort, walking them through three core tasks: order ahead for pick-up, order from a seat via QR, and find the status of an in-progress order.
What worked, and what's next.
What went well
Every user completed every flow on the first try — without prompting, without backtracking. The redesigned home, menu, cart, and tracking screens read naturally, and several participants asked when they could actually use the app.
Holding the line on Ya Kun's existing colour and type system meant the redesign felt like an upgrade, not a rebrand.
What could be better
Testing surfaced subtle decision-points we'd glossed over: how to surface ongoing orders when a returning user lands on home, and how to handle the moment a customer has both a pick-up and a dine-in active at once.
The next iteration consolidates active orders into a persistent home-screen card so the app never asks "Pick Up or Dine In?" when the answer is already on its way.
Three takeaways I'm carrying forward.
Designing within constraints sharpens decisions.
Redesigning an existing app meant working within an established brand design library rather than starting from a blank canvas. It pushed every choice to be intentional — finding ways to improve the experience without losing what made Ya Kun recognisable.
Disagreement, handled well, makes the work better.
Working in a team means design decisions are rarely unanimous. Learning to voice my perspective clearly while staying open to my teammates' views helped us land at outcomes none of us would have reached alone.
Consistency lives in the conversations, not the file.
With three people working across different parts of the app, consistency could have easily fallen apart. We learned quickly that alignment on design language and regular check-ins were just as important as the design work itself.