UX Case Study - Shopping App
My role
Solo UX designer designing an app from concept to delivery.
Timeline
Nov 2022 - Jan 2023 (10 weeks)
Background
Cheyenne Coffee Roaster is a local coffee shop in Hong Kong's heart. They strive to serve freshly roasted specialty coffee.
Their target customers are in high demand for premium coffee but are always too busy for coffee purchases.
Problem
The Rise of home coffee consumption due to the pandemic makes e-commerce progressively important.
The company wishes to improve its app to provide a smoother shopping experience to customers and promote coffee home brewing culture in Hong Kong.
I conducted interviews with 6 coffee lovers who are aged 25-38 and visit specialty coffee shops regularly.
I have asked about their spending habits on coffee (at coffee shops & home), basic knowledge of coffee usually be found on the menu, pain points of home brewing and purchasing related products, etc.
User Interviews
Major Insight
Hard to understand the language of coffee. They found difficulties in ordering coffee and purchasing coffee-related products.
Too busy to purchase and fill up coffee beans and rather visit coffee shops.
Misunderstanding home brewing must be involving a lot of work and types of equipment.
Persona + User Journey Map
Based on the insight from user interviews and reviewing each actions, I made my best assumptions to try identifying these other pain points that provided opportunities for my design.
I applied Crazy Eight to brainstorm the possibilities to solve the obstacles I discovered from the above research.
Some of the ideas are interesting and practical, so I used several of them and tried to make them work.
Crazy Eight
1) How to have fresh coffee beans regularly?
2) How does the brew guide work the best?
3) How to make users understand the menu easily?
Ideation
The initial designs went through several user tests and uncountable iterations to ensure a friendly and scalable user experience.
I wish I could share every single part of the process with you! Below are the 5 major changes.
Solution
Easy, thoughtful, quick access are key
Reflections - What I would do differently next time
Don’t start with UI that early. I have a graphic design background, so I always could not wait to see the whole picture visually. This caused a lot of time to fix every iteration.
Don’t wait for perfection, move to the next step and keep iterating. When I look back now, I understand there is no “perfect outcome”, the only solution is to keep evaluating and reviewing.
Seek a mentor’s guidance and support in the industry earlier. Preparing my UX portfolio alone at home makes me feel like making a cart behind closed doors sometimes. I should start networking on LinkedIn and UX community to communicate with other talents earlier. But after all, it takes darkness to see the star, I understand good peers are crucial in this industry. I am so excited to meet more and more UX talents soon.
Thank you for reading!