Joe on the Go: Coffee Gifting Platform
Discovery sprint and concept testing for a digital UX challenge
Project Snapshot
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Team & Timeline
February 2021
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Role: User research, information architecture, interaction design
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Team: Academic work in collaboration with Harsh Gupta and María Risueño
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Problem
How might we design and deliver a unique digital food delivery prototype that filled a current gap in the market?
In Spring 2021, we were given a three-week digital UX design challenge as part of the Integrated Design and Management program's core curriculum. The project's goal was to deliver a digital prototype around food delivery in three weeks.
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Overview
Our team of three IDM students explored everything from alcohol and cocktail delivery to grocery delivery using more sustainable packaging. In the end, we decided that coffee had our hearts and set out to design a coffee delivery platform. This project took place at the height of the pandemic, so rather than focus on coffee delivery for the individual, we decided to focus our digital service on coffee gifting in a way that supports local small businesses and created connection.
The resulting platform - Joe on the Go - was designed after 2 weeks of user research, including in-person observations, ordering coffee delivery frequently ourselves, conducting in-depth interviews with coffee stakeholders (ranging from coffee drinkers to baristas to farmers and roasters to cafe owners) surveying users online, and conducting market research. It also involved drinking a lot of coffee and experiencing various coffee services in person.
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Outcome & Impact
By combining the ability to gift coffee from local cafes and coffee shops while sharing meaningful content (a news article, song, video message, or more), we were able to develop a digital prototype for a service that generates more business for local brands while meeting a gap in the market and serving a documented customer need.
The digital prototype: - Joe on the Go - celebrates authenticity, uniqueness, and the meaningfulness of a shared moment while offering a service larger established food delivery companies do not offer. While we ended the project in prototyping and didn’t pursue development, we see this as a viable business opportunity for future exploration.
Explore our interactive prototype in Adobe Xd below!
How We Got There
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Process
Discovery sprint
Our team started out with desk and secondary market research to explore current trends and needs, considering services for alcohol and cocktail delivery to grocery delivery using more sustainable packaging. In the end, we identified a unique gap in the market around beverage delivery and set out to design a coffee/tea delivery platform.
Observational & ethnographic research
We interviewed many coffee stakeholders from baristas to cafe owners to coffee drinkers to people who order coffee frequently to attempt to better understand their experiences.
We followed an interview guide we created to capture as much information about coffee as possible. This guide then helped us synthesize the interview data, which we then categorized into a list of key insights.
Data synthesis
We learned through this primary and secondary research that coffee is equal parts experience as it is a necessity, with 1/3 of all Americans reporting missing coffee shop experiences. Interviewees also shared that coffee is emotional (often associated with personal time or as a comforting ritual), a means for discovery (a mechanism for discovering new flavors, places, and people), and inherently social (often a catalyst for meeting a friend or co-worker).
While we learned many things through the discovery phase, our biggest insight was that very few options existed for sharing or gifting coffees and that our users wanted a way to share small gifts. While not what we initially expected to solve, we leaned into this learning and pivoted the digital platform to be a service for gifting coffee and coffee experiences.
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User pain point - lack of gifting options:
Our interviewees shared that most floral arrangements or sweet treats started at $30 and up, and sending a gift from Amazon lacked the customized content and sense of connection they craved. When it came to the coffee and food space, people were limited to sending gift cards, cash, expensive coffee bean subscription services or gift baskets, or using services like Uber Eats/ Door Dash, which are not well designed for coffee or gifting. While you can order drinks through these delivery services, users often reported beverages being spilled in the bag or being cold upon arrival.
At the same time, while Uber Eats and Door Dash have recently added some gifting options, it’s buried within their web platform, hard to find, limited in personalization, and lacking creativity. Our users identified wanting to send love or share content in meaningful and creative ways but couldn’t find a service that met their needs. On the other side, small coffee shops mentioned the challenges in using popular delivery services given the high fees (sometimes 30%), which destroyed their already small margins (8-10%). How might we better support small businesses, increasing their customer base while making it easier for people to say, “I care,” during an alienating and seemingly never-ending pandemic?
User Personas/Archetypes
To help answer this problem, we identified four core personas/archetypes from our interviews:
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the appreciator
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the lazy gifter
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the coffee explorer
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and the networker.
For each archetype, we identified their gifting objective, their available budget, their core pain points, their comfortability with technology, and key quotes. We also noted that while these four were most common, a single person can at times embody elements of many personas. These four archetypes were our North Star when beginning to prototype solutions.
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Prototyping & User Testing
We started out by designing low-fidelity wireframes and making some simple mock-ups in Adobe Xd to meet the list of user needs for each archetype. We then scheduled testing calls with our initial interviewees to test out our designs.
Through the user testing process, we were able to identify some key issues with our initial designs and areas in need of revision. Click the images below to learn more about each key learning.
Final Prototype
With these learnings in mind, we were able to develop a list of user stories for the platform stakeholders and a refined product requirements list. We also developed a final sitemap based on our tests, and refined our wireframes and interactive prototype in Xd.
Click here to watch our live demo.
Non-Functional Requirements & Risk Assessment
Lastly, we developed a set of additional non-functional requirements (see right) to explore in further prototypes and a list of risks (see below) that would need to be addressed if this digital service would ever move into development.
Wizard of Oz Prototyping
The final step for us in this project was to actually test the prototype out with an interviewee from start to finish and actually deliver a coffee!
This included our peer, Ange, actually recording a video and our team printing a QR code from FedEx, buying the coffee she ordered for a friend from Tatte, ordering an Uber and delivering the coffee to the recipient's doorstep. She was a little surprised but she enjoyed the coffee and experience.
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