The Introduction
Barista Valet is an app that allows users to order their coffee and have it delivered fresh & hot to their door Monday — Friday. David (CEO) and Allie (Project Manager) asked our team to assist in the UX of their current application as well as to build out a few new features that they were looking to incorporate. These features include: adding food items, a coffee quiz, and a sense of community. To address these needs, we performed multiple rounds of research and design iteration. Through our testing, we were able to make iterations on the existing design to create a fun, user-friendly, and delightful experience for Barista Valet users.
The Client
The Project
The Timeline
3 Week Sprint
01/10/22 - 01/28/22
The Team
UX Designers
Chloe Mason
Rachel Sniderman
Ximena Osorio
Daniel Rafferty
Client Discovery
Barista Valet, an upscale coffee delivery platform, tasked us with testing the usability of their existing application and adding features to support their growing client base. We were excited by the opportunity to work with them and help bring high-quality coffee to their clients. We performed business research, user interviews, multiple rounds of usability testing, and created multiple iterations of the prototyped design.
Our Process
01
RESEARCH
02
DESIGN
03
TESTING
04
CONCLUSION
01. Research
To get started we had to understand Barista Valet as a business before moving into design iterations. We started by analyzing their business model and taking a look at competitor and comparator features. We found a few insights through that round of research but wanted to be sure that our suggestions were firmly backed by the research. As a team, we were able to interview 10 people who were passionate coffee drinkers and 4 who were current users of the Barista Valet service. From all of this research, we were able to find that there were certain insights and findings that we wanted to focus on, the most notable being:
Interview Findings:
Education
Users are interested in personal education on the story of their coffee.
Flavor
Users are interested in trying new flavor profiles when it comes to their coffee.
Shop Local
Supporting local roasters is important to coffee drinkers.
Priority
Coffee is a daily priority for people, regardless of their circumstances.
Persona
In order to reference our target demographic and users throughout our process, we created Sara. She is a busy millennial who has a strong daily need for coffee but doesn't always have the best experience. As our team moved through our process we made sure to keep Sara's goals, needs, and frustrations in mind. We wanted to make sure we weren't designing what we wanted but something that Sara needs.
Journey Map
As a team, we wanted to be able to visualize Sara's journey throughout her day. We see that while she has some high points she is still experiencing quite a few low points in her morning when it comes to her coffee.
After having trouble sleeping she finds that she has run out of coffee beans. Sara tries to correct that shortcoming of her morning by trying to order a coffee online, unfortunately for her, the app isn't working. Attempting again to get her morning coffee fix she heads to the local cafe only to wait in a long line and for them to ultimately get her order wrong. After all that she is late for her first work meeting and tries to order coffee again, this time it arrives lukewarm but she accepts that this is what has become of her day.
We want to keep these low points of Sara's day in mind because it will help us connect to our target user as we move forward in the process. Making sure that we meet all of Sara's needs as well as noting any opportunities that we can find to improve Sara's morning.
02. Where Insights Meet Design
For us to turn these previous insights from research into a design we had to think about the features they become. The following are these insights and the potential features that as a team we have thought about creating:
Education
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Add the educational aspect of application with common coffee terminology
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Increase detail provided on different roasts and blends
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Link users to local roaster sites to learn more about their beverage
Flavor
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Coffee quiz to expose customers to new beverages and flavors
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Feeling of customization
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Make customization easy to use and through
Shop Local
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‘Local roasters’ section
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Local roaster highlight
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Provide additional details on the location and background of each roaster
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Provide additional information on BV’s relationship with local roasters
Quality
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Describe/ illustrate steps BV goes through to ensure quality coffee
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Quality assurance/ returns
Hesitations
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‘Reviews’ section so users can see how successful and consistent the current program is.
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Highlight thermos heat retention
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Highlight timely delivery
The Creation
As a team, we iterated on the existing design starting with a round of design studio. This allowed us to start with basic visualization and come together on the layout that we imagined for these features. From this point, we created a mid-fidelity version of our design to test the basic navigation to make sure it was intuitive to our users before distracting them with colors and visuals. Based on the feedback we received during our second round of usability testing, we compiled a list of changes that we recommend the Barista Valet team implement. We have already made a few changes to the HiFi Model, which are included in the final prototype.
Evolution of Barista Valet
03.Testing Our Theories
The following is a summary of the feedback we received from each usability test, and the design changes we made to the MidFi prototype as a result.
Features to add:
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Articles for users to read while they drink coffee
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Previous orders feature
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Rewards & loyalty program
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Adjustment to home screen layout seems too chunky and users didn't realize there was more to it.
Once our design was complete, we ran another round of usability testing. For our second round of testing, we recruited 5 individuals to run through the same four tasks. Our team found that the success rate of the tasks improved in our second round of testing. Additionally, the time on tasks took longer at times in the second round of usability testing. This could be due to participants taking in the branding and visual elements displayed to them.
04. Conclusion
We found that the updates made to the design for Barista Valet accomplished our goal of creating a fun, user-friendly, and delightful experience for users. As we finished up our design for our client there were a few things we wanted them to keep in mind as they move forward with our findings including iterations on the following features;
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Revise and add to the quiz
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Back buttons
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“All that apply” options
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Detailed food and drink descriptions
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‘Current Roasts’ imaging
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Share to existing social media platforms
Additionally, there were a few things that we wanted our client to keep in mind to measure the success of the redesign. Using the H.E.A.R.T. framework we are hoping that with our redesign Barista Valet can see a growth in the number of accounts made as well as an increase in retention and interaction with the menu, the coffee quiz, and neighborhood. Overall, the experience with Barista Valet ended up being an incredible learning opportunity for us as a team. We were able to come together and iterate on design while working with a wonderful client to create quality morning coffee that gets delivered right to their users' door to brighten their day and allow them to focus on all the other things they need to get done rather than making their morning cup of coffee.