As much as this assignment was about updating Boston Pizza’s online experience, it was also about elevating their brand. Across Canada, Boston Pizza has a reputation for being a great place to go if you want to watch sports. While this is true, it offers more than just beer, big-screen TVs and a fun atmosphere – it also offers quality food. As a result of this reputation, though, Boston Pizza was known more for being a great sports bar than for being a great restaurant.

If we wanted to elevate Boston Pizza’s food in peoples’ minds, we had to start by elevating their food on their website – as well as throughout their entire online experience.

We started in September 2016 by conducting a user experience phase to overcome the complexities of the Boston Pizza’s business, which consists of nearly 20 different regional menus and promotions across Canada. With 60% of their traffic coming from mobile, we needed a design that put mobile first. As a result, we implemented a modular approach that featured prominent imagery, clear descriptions, and a seamless path to purchase. In addition to adding up-sell opportunities to touchpoints that didn’t have them before, we also incorporated MyBP, Boston Pizza’s loyalty program. Now, offers linked to members’ accounts automatically appear during the checkout process – creating additional up-sell opportunities.

Launched nationally in August 2017, the new BostonPizza.com features a simplified user experience that consists of 15 reusable templates for the entire site (500 pages in total) and is one of the first implementations of Adobe’s Experience Manager in Microsoft Azure in North America.

Since the new BostonPizza.com launched nationally in August of 2017, online engagement and order numbers have spiked. In only a couple of months, Boston Pizza experienced a 14% increase in logged-in orders YOY and a 27% increase in MyBP sign ups YOY. They also experienced a decrease in places where it counts; namely, a 10% decrease in page views per order MOM as a result of a more simplified path to purchase and a 27% decrease in cart abandonment rate YOY.

With an updated, simplified online experience that elevates their food, as well as their brand, Boston Pizza is continuing to solidify its position in the market as Canada’s number one casual dining brand.

Boston Pizza’s target audience is millennial parents. Our research indicated that, when it comes to deciding which restaurant to choose, quality of food is a key consideration. As a result, food became the focal point of our re-design. We elevated the food in obvious places, like the menu and home pages on the site, by featuring imagery that was big, colourful and appetizing. We also elevated it in less obvious places, like the checkout screen, by creating opportunities to up-sell guests at touchpoints that hadn’t been considered before.

Simplification of the user flow, as well as the design of the site, also played an important role in elevating the food in that it allowed us to strip away unnecessary clutter and direct users’ attention to the items we wanted them to purchase – as well as minimize the amount of pages (and time) it takes for them to order food.

Boston Pizza is Canada’s number one casual dining brand, serving more than 40 million guests across the country each year. Over the years, as their number of online orders started to grow, their online experience became outdated. In addition to menu items being difficult to see and access (especially on mobile devices), the ordering process was convoluted and, at times, overly complicated. As Boston Pizza’s Digital Agency of Record, we were tasked with the job of updating their online experience and making it more accessible to current users.