“The Perfect Venue in Which to Discuss the Imperfect Venue”

Redesigning the A2 Cafe Experience

This is the second in a series of entries I will be posting for my Interaction Design: Experience course at CCA taught by Alexander Baumgardt.

At the beginning of our class, our instructor asked us what experience we all go through every day. My classmates started calling out guesses like bathrooms, bus shuttles, and lack of sleep to name a few. This went on for a couple of minutes until someone made a comment about our school’s Cafe that got us all laughing:

“Not going to the A2 Cafe?”

After the laughter died down, we were given the brief to the first week’s assignment. Redesign the A2 Cafe. This was a one-week group project that I completed with the help of my classmates Christopher Paniati, Zoe Rogers, and Uriel Zarate.

Initial Hypotheses

After we were briefed on the assignment, my classmates and I went to do some initial brainstorming. After some initial mind mapping, we came up with a list of priorities we thought customers attending A2 might value the most. These sets of values set the framework for the discussion guide we would be using when conducting interviews.

Getting the Big Picture

To make sure we understood the needs and values of all the people involved in the A2 Cafe ecosystem, we interviewed one teacher, one A2 staff member, seven students, and conducted an online survey. From the data we collected, we arrived at several key insights:

• Almost every customer we interviewed went to A2 for convenience
• The staff tends to be more friendly with frequent customers rather than new customers
• A2 was a place where students would run into friends from other majors that they wouldn't see otherwise
• The menu was cluttered, making it hard for a customer to quickly make a decision about what they wanted to eat
• A2’s atmosphere was loud and sterile, making it very difficult to have a sit-down meal there
• Because of their spatial and regulatory constraints, it would be challenging to expand their operations elsewhere

Modeling the Current Experience

Collecting all the data from our insights, interviews, and survey results, we then constructed a journey map that modeled the current experience for A2 customers. Some important highlights we wanted to include were the emotions of the customer at different points in the experience, the rush times according to the employees, and a blueprint of the current space.

Storyboarding Solutions

After reflecting on some of the major pain points from the journey map and our insights, we came up with two solutions to help improve the experience:

A2 Cafe Redesign

To help create a quiet space for customers to sit, we proposed opening up an underused space across the way from the A2 cafe. This would also double as a convenient meeting space for teachers and students to have one on one conversations about projects and assignments.

The A2 Garden

For our second solution, we proposed putting a small A2 pop-up stand in the back lot of our school. This would provide healthy pre-made meals for students that were in a rush between classes, and provide a pleasant outdoor environment by having seating next to the gardens.

On Reflection

Looking back on this project, I feel that we put a lot of our effort into understanding the current state of the A2 Cafe. This gave us a solid foundation on which to come up with concepts. Although I was really excited about the ideas we came up with, I felt we were a little short on time when we finally got around to brainstorming our solutions.