I Designed an App and It Failed
Part II — Understanding the Problem
Welcome back!
In my previous blog (click here), I discussed my relationship with failure and willingness to take action despite of it. I shared the motivation behind wanting to create a solution that reduces the amount of time we waste in lines. In this post, we will examine the problem in more detail and showcase samples of the BeeFree interface.
I never planned on naming the tool BeeFree. Sometimes when you take action, despite the outcome, it’s difficult to plan everything. However, as it stands today, the name implies that anyone who uses the tool is free to do what they want with their time, instead of wasting it in lines.
Like many of us, I didn’t know what to call my idea at first. I started hunting for inspiration through pictures. I looked for pictures of people standing in lines. It made sense at the time. I began my search on a fabulous website called Unsplash.
Unsplash’s pictures are royalty free for commercial and personal use (proof).
I found the picture of a bee next to a flower, as seen above, by accident. The picture made me think about busy people. And how busy people, who have to stand in lines only want to do one thing — be free from the agony and pain of waiting. At this point, the name BeeFree was obvious.
In my view, finding inspiration in a picture of a bee, while searching for people standing in line, is lucky. Accomplished people often say that one of the reasons they are successful is because of luck. They also suggest that the more you do, the luckier you get.
So, if you want luck on your side, take a chance on yourself and do more. Had I not been searching for inspiration, even though I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, I would have never stumbled upon the picture that would end up helping me name my prototype.
Some people would argue that naming isn’t important, at least not right away. To be honest, I don’t think it really matters. Especially, if you are intimate with the problem.
If you are an entrepenuer looking for the next business idea, naming probably isn’t the first thing on your mind. But if you are a user of your own product that means you understand the problem and naming is a fun exercise that helps boost your confidence.
The Problem
I discovered that on average, Americans spend 37 billion hours a year waiting in lines (Richard Larson, MIT). That’s over 100 hours of wasted time per person in the United States. For such a scarce resource, waiting in line seems like a terrible way to waste it.
Not only is waiting-in-line wasteful, but the physical discomfort and associated stress is equally agonizing. The worst is when the waiting grows into boredom and blossoms into anger. The longer the lines, the angrier we get. It’s obvious we need a solution.
The Solution
BeeFree: a virtual system that waits in line for you.
I wanted to design a solution that eliminates the bottleneck that occurs when multiple people arrive to a vendor at the same time. The idea was to move this physical bottleneck into the virtual space and free people up to do whatever they want. I don’t want people to think that BeeFree is like Uber for queuing. It’s not, because someone is not going to wait in line for you.
The Design
Since I started with a name, it was easy to come up with the color scheme, which as you can see is yellow and charcoal grey. The design below was a product of the workflow. I will share more about that later.
I applied two simple design principles to create the first version of the interface: simplicity and familiarity. The principle of simplicity forced me to minimize the number of controls and the principle of familiarity allowed me to take advantage of the look and feel of existing social applications.
Similar to other social review sites, a few simple features that I decided to include were:
- Maps
- Search capability
- Customer-centric data
- Virtual queue
- Ratings (by longest wait times)
How it works
I wanted to make the workflow as simple as possible. Below is a three step process I created:
Step 1: Submit a request to BeeFree
You can search for a vendor, discover estimated wait time, and request to be added to a vendor’s virtual queue.
Step 2: BeeFree estimates wait times
BeeFree calculates estimated wait time based on your position in the queue, the number of people at the venue, and the number of people who have left.
Step 3: Invitation from BeeFree
BeeFree sends a push notification based on your location.
The baseline technology: geolocation.
Benefits to the consumer
- Never waste time waiting in lines
- Sense of control — do what you want with your time while you wait
- Get accurate wait-time measurements
- Productive use of waiting period
Benefits to the vendor
- Elevated experience (use this to distinguish yourself from competitors)
- Effective inventory management (based on customer flow, peak times, turnover rate)
- Efficient distribution of workforce based on accessibility to queue information
- Increase customers — eliminate perception of long waits
- No more reservations
- Predictable arrival times
- Reduced costs, e.g. to manage customer flow in and out of venues
- Access to Customer-Centric Data
- Access to frequently visiting customers — tribe info
- Accurately calculate peak visitation hours
- Manage inventory
- Manage staffing needs
- Establish a competitive edge
- Elevated customer experience
- No more reservations
- The most efficient vendors can start writing best practices that others can adopt — become a leader in your area
Clearly, an endless buffet of benefits.
Basic application functionality
I took the benefits and put them in three separate camps: views, inputs, and navigation. This categorization helped me identify the basic functionality of the application, which is listed below.
- Views: search capability, estimated wait times
- Inputs: ability to add profiles to a virtual queue
- Navigation: queue-centric data
Design Framework
The design framework was created based on the basic functions of the application.
The design framework had to include the overall structure for two different experiences. If you are a customer, you need to be able to search for vendors, review wait times, and add yourself to a virtual queue. If you are a vendor, you might be interested in looking at customer-centric data and be able to add customers, who don’t have the app, to your queue.
Examples of the BeeFree design framework are shown below.
Let’s take a look at the views in more detail.
Home View
The Home view is used for performing vendor searches and launching other views like the Map view — very similar to Yelp. I wanted to take advantage of familiar interactions.
Map View
The Map view allows a user to search for vendors. If the user is in Map view, he or she can launch the Search bar using the Search control. Users can also apply filters and switch from Map to List view from the Search control. Again, similar to Yelp.
Decision View
No one really enjoys making decisions. So, the view designed here is meant to facilitate the process by showing estimated wait times. This is key for time management in case you have other things to do while you wait.
You can add yourself to any queue. However, you can only add yourself to one queue at a time to eliminate a false-positive on a reservation. This feature is designed to protect vendors.
For those of you wondering, I did all my designs with a tool called Keynotopia. This tool is easy to use. It lets you rapidly prototype wireframes and interfaces for mobile and desktop applications.
It cost me $49, for one license for a lifetime of free upgrades, and it was worth every penny. My favorite feature of this tool is the ability to demo designs on a smart-phone.
As we have discovered here, it’s not difficult to define your system’s basic functionality if you are intimate with the problem you are solving. But if you are feeling stuck and don’t fully understand your user’s problems, then follow basic human-centered design processes. Some of which include, defining personas (representatives for your user population) and telling stories (that define user goals and priorities) to help define parameters for your design.
You don’t have to use these tools but they help iterate through the design process quickly. I ended up creating personas and stories for BeeFree to help solidify the workflow, which then helped me decide what views should look like.
I didn’t know if the views were going to work, but I took a chance, and designed them anyways. It may not be the best design in the world, but it was a start. This exercise was meant to change my relationship with failure by examining if I could transform an idea into a digital prototype.
Now, if you are curious who my personas are and what stories I came up with, please join me in my next post. I will share more about the workflow I created for two different user groups, and the views that helped BeeFree look and feel like a working application.
Parts of this blog series can be quickly accessed using links below:
I Designed an App and It Failed: Part I
