Additional Considerations

There were a few other areas the founders wanted us to touch on in our designs — ensuring users can find the Roaster of the Week, finding ways to get customers’ feedback on their products, and increasing stickiness with the service by adding a sense of community.

 Our Solution

A redesigned Barista Valet, which proved on average 43% more usable than the previous version. Our redesign included the following features, (which you can see more in depth below, in the Design & Testing phase of our process).

For more views of before & after, see below.

 Our Process

We Started With What We Believed

Based on initial business research and what we learned from the Barista Valet team, we hypothesized that coffee drinkers want an affordable and convenient way to get their morning coffee and breakfast. Our assumptions included:

Leading us to wonder, how might we provide users a convenient way to enjoy their favorite food and beverages in the morning?

Validating Our Beliefs

To substantiate our assumptions, we conducted 6 user interviews with existing or churned Barista Valet customers, as well as 5 propsective customers (coffee lovers & existing subscription holders).

We also sought broadly to validate Barista Valet’s value proposition and understand their customers’ wants, needs, and pain points.

What We Heard

What We Learned

Among those insights, we found…

What We Validated

We circled back to our original assumptions to revisit what beliefs were validated through our research, versus some that were not substantiated.

Refining Our Focus

Armed with learnings from our research, we used a few tools to deepen our understanding of the Barista Valet customer and their experience.

Persona

We created a fictionalized representation of a Barista Valet user, Stephen, who reflects the needs of our target audience. Stephen was our north star in creating solutions, designing, and iterating on our concepts. Below is an abbreviated version of the full persona.

User Journey

We then increased our understanding of Stephen by walking through, step by step, his “typical” experience using Barista Valet.

Service Blueprint

We also created a service blueprint, that outlined the actual processes of Barista Valet’s service, and the actions Stephen takes while engaging with those processes.

The user journey map and service blueprint were essential to understanding the existing flows and crystalized opportunities for improvement within Barista Valet’s service and or, specifically, mobile app experience.

Revised Problem Statement

Ultimately this all culminated in an updated problem area for us to keep centered as we moved into design:

How might we create a convenient delivered cafe experience that saves users’ time, without compromising quality?

Some of the most exciting outcomes of our design studio were realizing things we initially thought were a “must,” weren’t actually practical or necessary. For example, Product Reviews.

The final set of features that would be incorporated into our converged designs were:

Our Prototype

Click around above, or take a look at some key tasks below!

What We Changed & How It Performed

Below are each of the changes we made from the original designs and how these changes increased usability across all three tasks assigned to participants.

What We Changed, A Recap:

How it Performed: Streamlined Primary Navigation

How It Performed: Order Management Flow

How it Performed: Roaster Catalog

How It Performed: Pausing Deliveries

Pausing deliveries, however, a brand new feature, proved to have issues throughout testing.

Many participants had trouble finding the button and the language didn’t totally resonate.

So, following our last round of testing, we made some final adjustments. We made the call to action button and weekly total sticky to the bottom of the screen, along with the weekly navigation sticky to the top, so users know what week they are looking at at all times.

Untested Features

Two final features we developed were push notifications and a customer feedback modal. Barista Valet currently has notifications for when orders arrive, but our research indicated users often forget to adjust their order — so a reminder daily or weekly would be a tremendous benefit.

The customer feedback modal will allow Barista Valet to get regular insight into customer sentiment and hopefully solve problems or frustrations proactively, rather than reactively after churn.

These screens were not part of our testing, so as you’ll see below, we do recommend additional testing for these features and the revised delivery pause flow.