Coffee Shop Reservation App for students/ workers

This is my independent capstone project to design an experience for those who visit coffee shops to study or work. As a person who enjoys going to coffee shops for good coffee and people-watching, I’ve noticed many customers come to the shops to study or do their work. This observation grew my interest in learning more about their experience and challenge how I can build a better user experience for them.

Double Diamond Methodology

This 6-month project was led in Double Diamond methodology. Double Diamond is one of the effective design practice to identify needs or challenges to “design the right things“ and design and evaluate the new solution in order to “design [the] things right“.

One of the strengths of Double Diamond model is that it allows designers to iterate the process. Depending on the progress, I was able to go back and forth to continue the design process.

Credit: Design for Health

Discover Phase

At Discover phase, the initial part of the methodology, I wanted to answer the following questions:

  1. What do people visit coffee shops for?

  2. How do people behave and/or interact with others at coffee shops?

  3. What determines people's coffee shop choices?

  4. What kind of conveniences and/or inconveniences people experience at coffee shops?

To study these questions in-depth, I started with interview target audience: anyone who visited coffee shops to study or work at least 3 times. After interviewing the participants, I coded all the interview scripts to develop thematic analysis.

Categories

Frequency of visiting coffee shops. Quiet atmosphere, Supporting small businesses, Community, Proximity, convenience. Occupation. Coffee shop promotions. Employment status, Negative experience, Positive experience, Neutral experience, Customer service, Customization options, Food options, Drink options, Coffee shop amenities, Motivations, Searching strategies, Overcoming challenges

Themes

These themes represent the participants’ experience at coffee shops and what factors impact their coffee shop choices. Overall, I found that people look into location, beverage/food options, quiet atmosphere, and friendly customer service. When it comes to studying or working at coffee shops, they prioritize internet access, noise level, and location.

Define Phase

In this phase, I analyzed the insights from the Discover phase. Based on the primary research’s findings, I have gathered data on the people with hybrid-working or remote-working lifestyles. Hence, I developed two personas that reflect each lifestyle and how it affects each coffee shop experience.

•Charlotte, who sometimes works remotely at coffee shops, needs a quiet space so she can stay focused on her work and virtual meetings during her work hours. 

•Charlotte needs to find a seat as soon as she arrives at coffee shops so that she can be ready to work. 

In her journey, Charlotte finds challenges with finding an available seat and focusing on her work due to the coffee shop’s noisy environment. These inconveniences negatively affect her productivity and feelings. Then, I summarized Charlotte’s needs and insights:

•Farah, who is a loyal customer of a popular local coffee shop, needs to place an order in advance so she can pick up her order without waiting. 

•Farah, who often rides her scooter, needs a parking space because she needs a place to leave her scooter when she goes inside of a coffee shop. 

In her journey to her favorite coffee shop, Farah faces some challenges. First, when she rides her scooter to get there, she cannot find a space to park her scooter. Since she usually goes there at lunch time, the place gets busy so she needs to wait to order and receive order. Farah seeks for shorter waiting time because she needs to get back home to work.

Design Recommendations

After successfully defining the problems, I created a list of design recommendations to move forward to build new UX solutions:

Key Features

After identifying design recommendation, I thought of how to display the solution, which I started with two fundamental key features. I decided to build a mobile application because mobile application is portable for people to access at anytime, and it can send messages or alert the users to stay connected with the users. Then I built a user flow for people to navigate coffee shops and reserve a seat at coffee shops.

User Feedback: Direct User vs Indirect User

During the initial design phase, I drew low-fidelity mockups and presented them to potential app users and coffee shop employees. The main goal for this iterative design process was to collect general first impressions on the user flow in each interfaces.

The potential app users would be any customer who would use the application to browse and reserve a spot at a coffee shop. To learn more about general coffee shops’ operation styles, employees’ interaction with customers, and customers’ behaviors at coffee shops, I also showed the prototypes to the coffee shops employees (indirect users). These feedback helped me refining the prototypes to design the solution in appropriate context.

High-Fidelity Prototypes & Usability Testing

The high-fidelity prototypes below were tested for usability testing— here are the key findings on the UI and UX.

UI Feedback

  • Time picker for set duration was difficult to notice. 

UX Feedback

  • The “Live crowd meter” in the coffee shop profile page helps users to know how busy the coffee shop is. It can help them to decide when they want to go. 

  • Noise level- quiet, moderate, lively are not permanent levels. Noise level can change moment to moment. Also, everyone has different music genre preferences..

Based on the given UX feedback, the challenge was how to determine noise level because everyone has different tolerance in noises. The next question was: how might we measure noise level at coffee shops so that it can help customers to find preferable coffee shops to study/ work? I thought of another user flow of collecting customers’ experience at the coffee shops— after a user visits a coffee shop, the app can ask about the users’ experience. The user can rate the overall noise level and share additional comments to further describe the moments.

The Customer Review’s Updated User Flow:

  1. After user visits a coffee shop, the app will send a survey questions.

  2. Users will be asked the following questions and can leave comments:

    • Service

    • Noise level

    • Food & beverage quality

    • Ambience

    • Additional comments

3. At the end of the survey, user will be asked if they want to post this review anonymously or not. 

Takeaways

At the end of the capstone project, I shared the process with professors and had a meaningful discussion on what would be the next steps for this solution.

  • Iterate the process of designing and getting user feedback on the new user flow/ prototypes.

  • Consider edge cases— how can we guide users toward an optimal user journey?

  • Iterate the double diamond methodology for coffee shop owners' experience with the application.