Dagens

The Challenge

Wholesalers embrace large-scale industrialised food production and global supply chains dominate to dominate sourcing for professional kitchens — this serves convenience and reliability for chefs. At the same time they support degrading natural eco systems, poor animal welfare and outcompeting local farmers who farm in smaller scale with responsible practices. Dagens set out to create a user friendly platform where chefs can source responsibly produced produce directly from local farmers.

My Role and Contributions

As the lead product designer at Dagens for 3.5 years, I played a key role in designing and optimising tools that encouraged behaviour change, streamlined workflows, and fostered trust between farmers and chefs. In addition to classic, responsive UX/UI design, my work spanned behavioural design, designing transitions between digital and physical touchpoints, building the design system including some frontend development and process facilitation, with a focus on delivering impactful solutions.

Understanding the users

Farmers and chefs, not to mention their contexts, farms and kitchens vary immensely! With very limited previous experience with these domains it was essential to get proper first-hand insights. I used contextual inquiry to understand users' real context and workflows, interviews to uncover pain points, and video calls for quick validation of early feature ideas to ensure we solved real problems efficiently. Monitoring usage data and behaviour patterns, tagging along in sales meetings and handling customer support further deepened my understanding. This mix of qualitative and quantitative methods kept me close to users and ensured informed design decisions without slowing down product development.

Documentation notes from a two-day contextual inquiry with insights to be shared with the rest of the team.

Design for behaviour change

Transitioning to more direct trading often requires chefs and farmers to change habits and routines. We all know that changing habits is tricky! I designed tools, features and communication using behavioural frameworks to nudge users toward key actions, ensuring simplicity and reliability — without implementing manipulative practices or dark design patterns of course.

Framework for diagnosing current behaviour support and discovering potential future interventions to implement.

Prototyping and usability testing

We typically had a very high pace during development. We built basic versions of features, released behind feature toggle and tested with real users and data to investigate hypotheses, usability and iterate based on the feedback. This was only possible due to very close collaboration, relationships and regular communication with key users. However, occasionally when I was ahead of the devs, I created prototypes and tested solutions prior to building — below is one example (click to try yourself).

Visual design and design system

I expanded and maintained Dagens’ visual identity, building:

• A scalable design system with consistent typography, spacing, and UI components.

• Accessible colour palettes and intuitive iconography to enhance usability.

• An evolving component library based on atomic design principles

The design system ensured consistent user experience across the platform and increased development efficiency.

Landing pages

I designed, built, and maintained the platform’s landing pages, effectively communicating Dagens’ mission to users. These pages were optimised for clear messaging and seasonal updates, helping chefs and farmers quickly grasp the platform’s value.

Beyond Design: Goal and process facilitation

As is common in startups, roles and responsibilities often overlap. Beyond design, I wrote copy in English, Norwegian and Danish and occasionally went into the frontend to improve UX-specific issues. I took product management responsibility and initiated implementation and monitoring of OKRs to align the team’s efforts. By facilitating goal-setting and supporting the definition and tracking of impact metrics, I helped the team stay focused on addressing real user problems and delivering tangible business value.

Impact & Reflections

While I don’t have specific numbers, and this definitely was not a one-man show, the continuous growth in users, orders, and order sizes throughout my time at Dagens speaks to the platform’s increasing value. More importantly, we saw a shift in user behaviour—many farmers and chefs became reliant on Dagens for their daily operations.

Hearing statements like “My business wouldn’t be where we are today if we had not used Dagens” reinforced that we were solving actual problem problems and delivering real value to our users . Beyond just building features, we created tools that truly supported more effective direct trade between farmers and chefs.