Barboxx
Skipping the Line, One Locker at a Time
Overview
Barboxx is a mobile ordering and smart-locker pickup system built for bars and nightclubs. Patrons open a tab, order drinks, and pick them up from a Barboxx locker. I joined as the second designer on the product after the founders felt the initial design direction wasn't meeting the bar of what the product needed to be.
Problem
The first pass at Barboxx's ordering flow treated the app largely as a digital tab — open a tab, add drinks, close a tab. It didn't account for the real complexity of a drink order: mixers, upgrades, doubles, specialty and seasonal items that vary bar to bar. That gap was enough that the founders brought me on to take the design in a different direction.
Solution
I redesigned Barboxx as a full POS-style ordering flow: patrons build a customizable drink order on their phone the way they would on a food-ordering app, track it through a live queue, and retrieve it from a smart locker using a swipe-to-open action tied to push notifications.
Reframing the Problem
Instead of designing Barboxx as "a tab app," I approached it as a point-of-sale ordering flow — closer to a mobile food-ordering experience (think a coffee or QSR app) than a payments app, but with more customization: alcohol types, brands, mixers, and upgrades that vary bar to bar.
That reframing changed the core question from "how do we let someone open and close a tab" to "how do we let someone build an order with confidence, track it, and safely retrieve it" — which is a much more familiar mental model for most users, even though the pickup mechanism (a physical smart locker) was brand new.
