Coffeelicious — A Journey in developing the Coffee Tracker Application
Needfinding: Pick an Activity; Make an Interview & Observation Plan
The journey began in earnest in week two with a goal of picking a topic of interest that would be interesting to me but also maybe solve a problem for others. I have a fulltime job as a Director in R&D for a public company on the Nasdaq, so I admit what I chose was completely fictional. Since I have an inbred love for coffee and caffeine, I chose this as my topic. First, the journey because with needfinding:
I chose Time for my observations. I wanted to learn about the habits of people around caffeine addiction — specifically as it relates to Starbuck customers. I asked my 3 participants to walk me through their daily routines in relation to their need for caffeine. I am envisioning an application that charts a user’s Starbucks runs with the drink type and caffeine levels of known drinks. The idea is to create a pattern of caffeine consumption correlated with mood and performance.
Ideation
One thing that everybody needs to survive is coffee. Coffee can help you make it through even the worst days, and it is an international vice that makes the world go around. However, our favorite beverage has another dark secret — caffeine addiction. If there is a way to monitor consumption, find peak times of the day to maximize our mental state, and to continue to enjoy the deliciously brewed nectar, we can feel better about our choices and even adventure into other types of brewed drinks. A crowd-sourced coffee machine in the palm of our hands.
Prototype
Prototyping was a fun stage in which we got to imagine how users would make use of our application. Eventually the two storyboards were merged into a single application. We also looked for inspiration from other interfaces:
Design Heuristics
Most of the problems identified in the prototypes are the lack of consistency through different screens. Issues like missing help are easy to rectify, but following standards in mobile web design are recommended. There are a lot of elements placed on the interface but no logic in their placement. Distributing these elements and using a navigation bar properly would be a great benefit. Navigation between screens should adopt industry standards, and iconology would go a long way here. My best advice would be to download some existing apps from the platform app store and looks at how some of the more popular interfaces are designed.
A plan and a Skeleton
At this phase, we began to implement changes from feedback. Some of the changes were:
• Modify start screen to make the concept more intuitive. Remove additional clutter.
• Illustrate tracking options more clearly.
• Need to show location; provide better mapping and coffee house choices
• In addition to mapping caffeine levels, show a clock to display current time. Can’t assume that the user will see a clock in the OS depending of what platform the app is run from.
• Support pinch and zoom for mapping.
• Add better help hooks
• Use better icons such as a calendar for scheduling.
At this step, we also began our project schedule:
We also played with some interface concepts:
Ready for Testing
Time for testing! This is the step where the metal meets the road. We also introduced some mobile designs which is what we ultimately want to develop:
Test Your Prototype
And walla! We reached the end of our journey. After developing a test plan, we had our users perform some tests for us. We also used UserTesting.com and got some great feedback from our A/B testers.
Conclusion
This has been a fun journey and though the product is fictional, I do hope to use what I have learned from the class in some of my non-fictional products. Stay tuned! Coffee is such a wonderful gift from God…