I Designed an App and It Failed
Part III: Ideas for Interaction Design
Welcome back!
In my previous blog, I shared how BeeFree got it’s name and a mind-blowing statistic on how much time we waste every year waiting in lines. I also shared information about some useful tools like Keynotopia and unsplash.com that helped facilitate the initial design.
In this post, we will meet Beth and Ashley, two of BeeFree’s primary users, and we will learn about their goals and priorities that helped shape how BeeFree looks and functions. Personas and stories are not the end-all when it comes to better design, but they do help organize your thoughts around what experience you want to create for your users.
Persona’s
Meet Beth Brown, SpaceX Employee (not a real person), often labeled as the ideal worker.
Beth Brown is a Senior Design Engineer at SpaceX. She works hard and plays even harder. She loves eating at the finest restaurants in Los Angeles on the weekends and on nights she is free.
Beth’s Goals:
- Beth’s primary focus is her career (hustler mindset)
- She loves the fast pace work and loves tackling multiple projects
- Her plan is to become a principal designer at SpaceX
Beth’s Priorities:
- She is always trying to make good use of her time
- She is always organized
- She pays attention to details, which bodes well in her job
Now, let’s meet Ashley Wilson, Restaurant Owner (again, not a real person).
Ashley Wilson is the owner of BoBo’s — the hottest new restaurant in West Hollywood. The restaurant is always busy and she never wants people to leave because of long lines! She has been waiting for a solution like BeeFree.
Ashley’s Goals:
- She wants to own a top tier restaurant in L.A.
- She wants to create the highest profit margins in restaurant history
- She never wants to turn a customer away
Ashley’s Priorities:
- Ashley prioritizes employee experience by efficiently distributing her workforce so they are neither bored nor overwhelmed at work (she knows this is a HR dream)
- She also wants to enhance customer experience by making their memorable
- She works hard to sustain her restaurant’s popularity
Beth’s Story
It’s Friday night, and Beth wants to dine at a popular restaurant near work (if you live in LA, near is a relative term). Beth also wants to finish up a report before the weekend. She is almost done but Elon Musk has got Beth working hard. She is hungry.
Since Elon wants her to finish the report, Beth plans to get dinner as soon as she is done with work, but she needs to manage her time. Beth uses BeeFree to solve her problem.
Beth selects the restaurant category from the Home view.
BeeFree takes her to Map view with a list of restaurants nearby.
Beth had heard about a new restaurant called BoBo’s. You guessed it, from me. Beth searches for the restaurant.
Beth finds BoBo’s. The estimated wait time at BoBo’s is 54 minutes, enough time for Beth to complete her report. This would put Beth’s arrival time at the restaurant at 8:00pm.
Beth has the ability to view her estimated wait time and the historical average wait time at BoBo’s before she makes her final decision. Beth decides she has enough time to finish her report, so she adds herself to the queue.
BeeFree sends immediate feedback to Beth to let her know she has been added to the restaurant’s virtual queue. Beth gets back to her report.
BeeFree sends Beth a push notification at 7:30pm for her 8:00pm reservation, to let her know it’s time to leave, because it knows she is 30 minutes away from BoBo’s based on traffic conditions.
Traffic does die down “sometimes” in West Hollywood.
Ashley’s Story
Everyone is town loves Ashley’s new restaurant BoBo’s. Rumor has it, this is where Olivia Munn and Aaron Rodger’s relationship blossomed.
Ashley is so popular that she has seen customers leave because of the long lines outside the restaurant. Since here restaurant is so popular, she overestimates on food and often finds herself throwing a lot of it away.
The popularity of her restaurant also forces her to have too many hostesses on some nights and not enough on others. She wants to look at the history of reservations made versus the turnover from last week in order to plan this week’s staffing and inventory needs.
Thanks to BeeFree, Ashley can accesses all the data she needs from the Navigation Menu. Ashley views customer flow rates, customer drop-out rates, and reservations both historically and in real-time.
What if a customer doesn’t have the app? Don’t worry, BeeFree has the edge cases covered. If a new customer without BeeFree is at the door and wants to make a reservation, Ashley can add the customer to the restaurant queue herself. Since the customer doesn’t have the app, he will get a text message instead of a push notification.
As you can see, the stories helped me design the workflow and the views needed for everything to make sense. Personas and stories are great tools that help facilitate the design process quickly.
Once I had a working interface, I wanted to see if real people would want to use it.
If you are curious about how people reacted when I showed them the tool and the current status of my project, please join me in my next post (click here). Be warned, it’s not a Hollywood ending. I will share with you what I learned from my market research and the social media pages I created to get attention but failed at miserably.
Parts of this blog series can be quickly accessed using links below:
I Designed an App and It Failed: Part I
