Overview:
Customers determining what type of bagged coffee to purchase often find the experience cumbersome and overwhelming. They often reach out for support from store employees or read descriptions about the bean varieties available. It takes time to make sound and informed purchasing decisions ensuring they buy something they will truly enjoy. BOLD Brew Choices is an in store kiosk app that individually supports and guides the customer toward their individual preferred coffee by following an intuitive and linear interface promoting confidence while making a coffee purchase.
Problem:
Bason Coffee Roasting company envisions enhancing their browsing and checkout experience. While being employed at Bason Coffee Roasting Company for the past two years it has become evident from my experience that customers need additional support when choosing what bagged coffee to purchase. A majority of my customer service efforts have been consumed by guiding customers through a series of questions to find their preferred coffee characteristics before they commit to a purchase. As the company expands and grows, the amount of customers needing assistance has increased. Lengthy wait times have resulted in order to receive employee assistance.
Solution:
The implementation of a kiosk app for customers to utilize and discover their preferred coffee characteristics on their own. The app follows a similar pattern to the questions employees ask potential customers in order to determine the coffee they should consider purchasing. Accessing the support of the kiosk app provides individualized customer support granting the customer to make empowered and informed decisions while purchasing bagged coffee.
BOLD Brew Choices provides users options while shopping for a coffee. The user has the option to shop for coffee by roast or to automatically generate a match dependent on how they answer a few quick questions.
BOLD Brew Choices provides quick and easy to answer questions attempting to match coffee types with individual customer needs/wants.
BOLD Brew Choices gives quick descriptions on what flavor/note each bean embodies to offer additional support to the user determining what flavor they prefer.
BOLD Brew Choices presents coffee categorized into three different kinds of roasts; lite, medium, and dark.
My Role:
Independently leading all aspects of this design project to include visual, UX, and UI design elements. Documenting feedback from user testing participants toward multiple ideation ideas to improve the functionality and overall design of the BOLD Brew Choices app in future next steps.
Process:
Using a combination of design thinking and lean UX methodologies to include a research, design, and validation phase during a 5 week time period taking place between May 23, 2023 to June 26, 2023.
Research:
Multiple research approaches revealed feedback as to how customers currently shop for bagged coffee and the pain points they experience when doing so.
Observation:
Gathering information while conducting in person observations of customers revealed that customers primarily shop for coffee by one of two ways. Customers typically stick with what they know they already like or they reach out for support. Customers were observed utilizing current resources such as employee recommendations and coffee bean descriptions to achieve support in order to make informed decisions on what type of coffee to purchase.
In person observations were conducted and it was evident that customers regularly approached the counter to order bagged coffee through employee customer support.
Interviews:
Interviews were conducted with customers purchasing coffee and with coffee shop employees.
Major take aways from performed customer interviews:
Customers find valuable support interacting with store employees to determine their preferred coffee.
47.1 % of customers heavily rely on product descriptions to influence their purchasing decisions.
Customers do not feel knowledgeable enough to make informed decisions when purchasing bagged coffee and search for outside support and resources.
35.3 % of customers found it moderately difficult to select a coffee.
“I’m not an expert”
“The descriptions are extremely helpful and play a huge role when I’m looking to purchase coffee”
“Recommendations would be great to have automatically when purchasing coffee”
Major take aways from employee interviews:
Customers use recommendations from employees to determine what coffee to purchase.
100 % of employees agreed that customer questions about different types of coffee consumed a large portion of their time leaving less time to fulfill orders and serve customers that already knew what they wanted.
“I’d like to know more to help customers make quick and good choices”
“I typically only hear “I like coffee” from customers and it takes a lot of effort to dig deeper into their preferences”
“I find it hard to explain coffee to customers”
Affinity Mapping:
Feedback following the interviews was sorted and categorized to determined how a majority of customers currently determine what bagged coffee to purchase.
“Method of Choosing” sorted into five categories customers typically use when selecting a coffee. Descriptions and recommendations were two categories of high importance.
Persona:
BOLD Brew Choices is for both the inexperienced and experienced coffee drinker. It is designed to save time, lead with support, and empower any customer purchasing bagged coffee to ensure confident and satisfactory buying decisions.
Age 24 - 38
Likes easy and reliable.
Enjoys trying new things.
Wants satisfaction.
Overwhelmed with choices.
Opportunity Statements:
How might we ensure confident decision making while purchasing bagged coffee?
How might we develop a quick and stress free coffee buying experience?
How might we increase the probability of a customer being satisfied with their coffee purchase choice?
Design/Validate:
User Flows:
The user flow below illustrates how a user can choose how they would like to interact with the kiosk app in order to make a coffee purchase. There are two main flows that ultimately take the user to the same check out process although the shopping method is different. It became evident during my research synthesis that customers shopped for coffee by one of two ways. Customers either explored coffee descriptions on their own or they answered questions proposed by store employees about what type of coffee they enjoyed. The flow incorporates both customer types by offering a customer to browse coffee by roasts/descriptions for the self-explorer and additionally offers the choice to be matched/paired with a coffee through a series of questions about the type of coffee they prefer.
Low Fidelity Design:
Wireframes were constructed using the guidance of the user flow to visually represent what a customer would encounter while utilizing the app.
The wireframe visually expresses a choice point presented to the user. The user can choose to shop by roast or by match.
After a user chooses to shop by roast they will be given choices between lite, medium, or dark roasts.
This frame shows what a user would see after they selected to shop by match.
Shopping by match navigates the user to a series of questions. The frame above illustrates the first question determining the customer’s preferred flavor.
Descriptions added to coffee varieties available.
Descriptions kept short in an attempt not to overwhelm the user but supply just enough information to understand the key characteristics of each bean variety.
First Round of User Testing with Wireframes:
Presenting wireframes to potential users revealed further ideations that needed to be made. Although a majority of users could navigate the app intuitively, a series of ideations presented themselves to make the user experience more fluid and enjoyable.
Providing short descriptions for what both shopping options offered.
Highlighting the shop by match option to achieve more user iteration.
Providing descriptions to explain the different roasts available.
Adding additional payment options.
Creating a guest check out option so users do not have to create an account during the payment process.
High Fidelity Design:
Taking the first round of user testing into consideration, improvements were implemented into a high-fidelity prototype before second round of testing commenced.
Additional text explaining the shopping options and a heavier importance placed on the shop by match option is needed.
The arrangement of shopping options were switched and additional text describing the options of shopping were implemented.
Additional text is needed to explain the difference between the types of roasts listed to ensure all coffee customers understand the roasts available.
Additional text added to describe the different types of roasts available.
A need for additional payment options.
Additional payment options incorporated into the design.
Additional options to move forward to payment without login.
A guest check out option for those wishing not to set up an account.
Second Round of User Testing with High Fidelity Prototype:
After incorporating the ideations from the first round of user testing, additional user testing was preformed, and the following ideations were documented:
Activating the BOLD Brew Choices logo to navigate to the home page when tapped.
Users were unfamiliar and intimidated by the traditional flavor/note coffee wheel.
Landing screen once the logo is activated.
The flavors are now separated into individual categories with supportive accompanying text to describe the distinct flavors/notes. The traditional coffee flavor wheel has been removed.
Bold Brew Choices Prototype
Conclusion:
100 % of customer feedback believed the implementation of this kiosk at retail locations would improve their coffee purchasing experience.
100 % of employee feedback stated that this design would improve their job performance.
Bold Brew choices was presented to the owners of Bason Coffee and was well received.
This product has not been implemented at this time due to financial considerations and business priorities.
Further Exploration:
Provide the same support to online customer shopping on both mobile and desktop.
Make additions to kiosk app including other retail items such as food items and specialty drinks.