Exploring Three UX Principles that Make the Starbucks Mobile App Delightful
In 2016 I landed my dream internship at the Starbucks headquarters in Seattle, Washington. As a long-time fan of their in-store experience, I was excited to get a look at the company from the inside. I quickly learned that there was a new experience taking over the Starbucks space that I have never used before, the Starbucks Mobile Order and Pay application (MOP for short). The more I tried it, the more I loved it. Now, I have come to rely on the Starbucks MOP app, especially in the time of quarantine and social distancing where for months my mobile Starbucks ordering process was my only dose of normalcy.
While I decided to work in Management Consulting instead of continuing at Starbucks after my internship was over, I’ve remained a die-hard fan of the company. After getting vaccinated this year, I decided to return to my firm’s office once a week to try and re-learn the old ways of socializing in person. One day, I watched as my coworkers pulled out their Starbucks MOP apps at 2:00 pm to line up orders for their afternoon pick-me-up drink. I followed them down to the conveniently-located Starbucks in my new office building. In the waiting area, we all compared our rewards stars and talked about exciting new menu items. It struck me that there was something delightful about the MOP app. Design principles are defined as “widely applicable laws, guidelines, biases, and design considerations which designers apply with discretion.” These principles help us apply an evidence-based approach to making design decisions. In this article, we will explore a few principles that have influenced the Starbucks MOP application’s design and how we can apply them to strengthen our own practice as UX designers.
Background: What’s Starbucks?
Just in case you have not come across the ubiquitous coffee chain before, let me give you some background. According to the company’s own timeline, the original Starbucks coffee house opened in Seattle’s Pike Place Market in 1971. Howard Shultz visited the shop in 1981 and, after a trip to Italy, he decided to buy the company in 1987 and expand it into the 32,000+ chain stores that exist today.
As I learned while interning and through my own experience as a patron, Starbucks focuses on providing a total customer experience beyond just serving coffee. Baristas, or Partners as Starbucks calls them, are encouraged to get to know you; music is curated for the store’s atmosphere, and the friendly interior is designed to be organic and inviting. Your local Starbucks is supposed to be your third place, a place to go as frequently as your home and office. This friendliness, trust, and ease is infused into the Starbucks MOP app, so that it keeps you coming back to your third place, even in uncertain times like during this pandemic.
A background on the app
Introduced in 2009, the Starbucks iPhone app was one of the App Store’s first mobile payment applications. Its introduction coincided with the launch of the Starbucks Rewards program. The early iterations of the app had a virtual cup that would fill up with little floating stars and jiggle around if you moved your iPhone. Since then, the app has expanded and gone through major re-designs and has even set the precedent for mobile ordering apps for other businesses.
Today, the MOP app allows users to order their desired drinks or food items ahead of time for pick up in-store, it also acts as a payment method for in-store orders, and enables users to track and earn their Starbucks Rewards if they create an account. Other features include buying, sending, and using digital gift cards in the app, discovering songs played in stores and adding tips for purchases made on the app. The app is an extension of the in-store experience, adding ease and convenience to Starbucks patrons. It has also worked well for the company by driving sales and engagement. The payment method is linked to an auto-reloading gift card or directly to a user’s credit card, removing the barrier of pulling out a credit card or cash that might make a user think twice about spending $4 on a latte. Personalized offers, messages, and promotions are delightful for users but also provide plenty of data for Starbucks to improve its menus, experiences, and service.
There are many ways to dissect this app, but I want to specifically look at how Hick’s Law, the Goal-Gradient Effect, and Jakob Nielson’s Flexibility and Ease of Use heuristics influence the Starbucks MOP application’s design.
Principle #1: Hick’s Law through the ordering process
In his book Laws of UX, designer Jon Yablonski describes Hick’s Law as “the time it takes for users to interact with an interface directly correlates to the number of options available to interact with” (Yablonski 24). If you’ve ever been to a restaurant with a multi-page menu and felt overwhelmed (looking at you, Cheesecake Factory), then you know the feeling of an increased cognitive load. Cognitive load is the amount of information your working memory can hold at a given moment.
Unless you know exactly what you want going in, it could take a long time to flip through every page, scan each menu item, and decide on what you want to order. Moreover, Starbucks is constantly changing its menu — whether adding new drinks and food items, seasonal products, or customization options. As of today, the menu has 164 drink options, 88 food options, 25 at-home coffee options, and even 13 choices of merchandise. In addition to choosing from a menu of items, users can customize their drink’s size, milk type, foam, temperature, flavor, toppings, add-ins, cup options, sweeteners, and espresso shots. These options can quickly add up, and prevent people from completing their orders.
This is where Hick’s Law comes in. The app first sorts all of these options into different tabs such as menu, featured, previous, and favorites. We will talk about these tabs in relation to another principle later in this article, but when the user clicks the Order option on the bottom navigation bar, they are taken to the Featured tab first, not the Menu tab with 160 options. This follows with Yablonski’s suggestion to “avoid overwhelming users by highlighting recommended options” (23). Starbucks wants users to see the interesting, season-specific options first before the full list of menu items. This both reduces cognitive load and keeps users coming back to check out what’s new. (If the user is not interested in the featured items and wants to look through all of the options available, they can click the Menu tab which sorts the 160+ items into a manageable list tree that the user can follow until they arrive at the drink they want.)
Let’s take a look at a more specific example. Imagine you want to order a Tall Flat White (my personal favorite), and you have never used the app. You open the app and make your way down a tree of screens, first picking hot coffee to separate out the cold drinks and then scrolling through a list of alphabetical categories: Americanos, Cappuccinos, and so on until you arrive at Flat White. Once you select Flat White, you can choose whether you’d like to customize the default drink settings. The drink form is not overwhelmed by all of the customization options because they are only visible if you click on the “customize” button. If we refer back to Yablonski’s book Laws of UX, the app has “[broken] complex tasks into smaller steps in order to decrease cognitive load” (23). This is a much faster, clearer, and easier way to arrive at your order rather than sifting through the hundreds of options on one page.
Principle #2: Rewards and The Goal Gradient Effect
Once you’ve started using the MOP app, Starbucks wants to reward you for all of those Flat Whites. Rewards programs date back to the 1700s when merchants would give patrons a copper coin that they could redeem if they came back to the store later (Hardy 2020). Programs now range from complex airline frequent flier miles to simple punch cards at small businesses. Let’s look at how the Goal Gradient Effect is used to make the MOP app’s reward program worthwhile.
In 1932, psychologist Clark Hull conducted studies on rats to determine if they would increase their running speed the closer they got to their destination box. Hull found that “the tendency to approach a goal increases with proximity to the goal” (Kivetz, Ran, et al, 39). In an article for the Journal of Marketing Research, The Goal-Gradient Hypothesis Resurrected, authors Kivetz, Urminsky, and Zheng explore how the Goal Gradient Effect can be applied to rewards programs for consumers. A key finding from their study was that “people’s tendency to accelerate toward their first reward predicts a greater probability of retention and faster reengagement in the program” (Kivetz, Ran, et al, 40). Essentially, giving users boots or bonuses that push them to their first reward keeps them motivated to continue with the program.
In the MOP app, your rewards progress lives on the home page; it’s the very first thing you see when opening the app. The progress bar includes increments from 25 to 400 points. After each purchase, you can watch as the golden indicator increases and you get closer to your reward. Starbucks takes it one step further with bonus star days, star challenges, and personalized rewards earning opportunities based on your buying history. As Kivetz, Urminsky, and Zheng point out, “the illusion of progress toward the goal induces purchase acceleration.” (Kivetz, Ran, et al, 40). The bonus bumps and double-star days propel you to open the app and check what extra challenges you can complete to get a boost in stars. For example, I just got an offer to get 50 bonus stars if I buy one Cold Brew drink every day for three days. The offer itself has a mini-progress bar that fills in with a nice check mark. The time limit of 6 days ensures I have some urgency to complete the transaction. I’ve even been known to buy strangers coffee to get my last star in on a bonus day. The Cold Brew suggestion is personalized for me, as I recently tried a Cold Brew drink, a departure from my Flat White, and Starbucks would like me to keep trying it as Cold Coffees are a big part of their sales in the Summertime.
The fun and gamified aspect of the app enhances the in-store experience. While there were physical rewards cards before, and some might argue that the rewards were better back in the good old days, the MOP app uses the Goal Gradient Effect to pull us in to continue to stack up your rewards. Before this existed, you had no incentive to go into the store beyond your typical morning or evening coffee run. The addition of rewards enhances the store experience by introducing users to new items, enticing them to try new drinks. It’s a win for Starbucks and a win for those who want to feel rewarded when they sip their drink or eat their food item.
Principle #3: From cup #1 to cup #100, the flexibility and ease of use heuristic
For our last principle, we can compare our journey from a novice user to one who is now using the app daily. How does the app use Jakob Nielson’s Flexibility and Ease of Use heuristic to accommodate all levels of users? We have been informally evaluating the app throughout this article and while we did not do a full walkthrough, one heuristic stood out to me: the flexibility and ease of use heuristic. An article on the Nielsen Norman Group (NNG) website tells us that, “we should prioritize flexibility and efficiency of use through the use of shortcuts and accelerators — unseen by the novice user — which speed up the interaction for expert users.” Another NNG article further explains that these Accelerators and shortcuts “provide an alternate method…for accomplishing a specific action and thus allowing expert users to complete a common task more quickly and efficiently.” This approach allows a system to cater to both inexperienced and experienced users” (Laubheimer, Nielsen Norman Group). In a UX Matters article titled, Universal-Design Principles and Heuristic Guidelines, we can see that this heuristic can go beyond just easiness and includes visibility of system status, accuracy and precision, empowering the user, keeping the user informed (Pichumani, UX Matters).
Whether it’s your very first cup or coffee or your one-hundredth time ordering a Flat White, the app should have handy shortcuts and accelerators that allow one to speed through the process as well as clear indicators of what’s happening to those who are still getting used to it.
For example, once you’ve gotten into the groove of ordering your Flat White every day at work, you can set up your favorite store and drink by hearting these options. Once you heart them, the drinks will live in your Favorites tab and stores will automatically pop up first when you go to order. This decreases the time and steps an advanced user needs to go through to get their order in. The ordering process that took us maybe a few minutes of searching, customizing, and confirming when we were acting like a novice user will now take us a mere few seconds to complete. Once again, making ordering so simple leaves you with fewer barriers to open the app when the “I need a coffee” thought pops into your head at 2pm.
Conclusion: Back up design decisions with evidence
Like Starbucks, your next design can incorporate Hicks Law by breaking down tasks to limit cognitive load. You can use the goal-gradient effect to keep users coming back to your product by introducing goals and milestones that push users to complete tasks and activities. Finally, ensuring that the app is flexible for all levels of users will help accommodate your audience’s varying abilities.
The principles in this article support an evidence-based approach to design. Incorporating them into your design practice will help make it easy and second nature for your users to complete transactions, reduce their barriers to using your product, and reward them for coming back. We want to design universally and using these well-established laws and principles can help us create consistent work across platforms. So, the next time you reach for your Starbucks MOP app to order your Tall Flat White, consider the principles we’ve discussed as you move through your experience.
References
“Company Timeline.” Starbucks, stories.starbucks.com/press/2019/company-timeline/.
Hardy, M. (2020, November 17). Shifting loyalty: How customer behavior changes when retail rewards programs go mobile. Notre Dame News. https://news.nd.edu/news/shifting-loyalty-study-examines-customer-behavior-when-retail-rewards-programs-go-mobile/
Kivetz, Ran, et al. “The Goal-Gradient Hypothesis Resurrected: Purchase Acceleration, Illusionary Goal Progress, and Customer Retention.” Journal of Marketing Research, vol. 43, no. 1, Feb. 2006, pp. 39–58, doi:10.1509/jmkr.43.1.39.
Laubheimer, Page. “Flexibility and Efficiency of Use: The 7th Usability Heuristic Explained.” Nielsen Norman Group, 22 Nov. 2020, www.nngroup.com/articles/flexibility-efficiency-heuristic/.
Pichumani, Anusha. “Universal-Design Principles and Heuristic Guidelines.” UXmatters, 9 Nov. 2020, www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2020/11/universal-design-principles-and-heuristic-guidelines.php.
Taylor, Kate. “Starbucks Infuriates Customers by Changing Its Rewards Program, Making It More Expensive to Get Some of the Most Popular Rewards.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 16 Apr. 2019, www.businessinsider.com/starbucks-new-rewards-levels-spark-backlash-2019-4.
Yablonski, Jon. Laws of UX: Using Psychology to Design Better Products & Services. O’Reilly, 2020.
