Starting Point
If you like and at least sometimes drink coffee, this might be the story for you.
Every person who drinks coffee at home from time to time has to buy it.
For this story I’m taking a person, residing in California, 30+ years old, employed and spending a lot of time at work, most probably they have a family (or a long-term partner and relations) and definitely like coffee.
They prefer the good quality of food and a sufficient choice, and can actually afford to buy it. Some of them can be really called eco-minded, appreciating natural and organic products, and give preference to local vendors while buying food and coffee as well.
Whole Foods Market is the most probable place they would go to buy food and coffee.
Because this is actually the place where you can see the choice of good coffee like this:
Heaven for a coffee lover, who has some knowledge about coffee and what influences its taste (such as region and elevation), prefers single origin to mixtures, chooses light/medium- roasted coffee to dark-roasted one and knows the difference, has the preference in acidity, and has some idea of what kind of coffee he likes.
BUT there’s hardly a person who can say for sure he knows all the coffee packs represented in the aisle.
Most probably a user just comes to the shop to get a tasty pack of coffee, he knows what he likes in coffee, but he doesn’t know all the coffee brands, vendors and each and single pack represented on the shelf.
The information written on the pack is not enough to have a clear idea of what kind of coffee it is or at least basic idea of its taste. And Googling each pack can really take a lot of time, resulting in disappointment instead of an easy purchase.
So basically a problem such a user comes across: a wide choice without clear understanding what does each coffee taste like and the absence of possibility to find this information quickly and easily, without having to spend 30–40 minutes on Googling several websites.
Yet you can hardly meet a person without a mobile device nowadays. So a mobile app is the way to help our customer solve the problem.
Mobile App
User Steps:
- Choose a pack of coffee from the shelf
- Scan the label
- Get the information about the coffee
- Read the information and make a decision
A: Dislike the coffee.
B.: Like the coffee.
If A, repeat the steps 1–4, until a suitable pack of coffee is found.
If B, go to the next steps:
5. Take the pack
6. Go to have it grounded
7. Pay for the coffee
8. Happily go home
User Decision. What it can be based upon?
- General information about the coffee (provided by the manufacturer. Suitable for a user who has some knowledge about the factors affecting the taste of coffee).
- What other people think about the coffee (rating and reviews). Mostly common for users who tend to rely on the opinion of other people.
- Recommendations? (real-life advice from the people they know).
- Brand / manufacturer reputation ?
User Flow
User Flow Tools:
The first User Flow I created looked like that:
As soon as that was done I tried to walk through the flow trying to identify the steps a user might not like.
Here’s what I’ve received:
Problem 1:
The first launch of the app and the first inconvenient step:
Once a user is in the shop with the main idea to get the coffee he likes, and spend little time on that, the idea of an additional step like authorization most probably will just make him annoyed.
Conclusion 1:
- This step shouldn’t be placed in the beginning of the flow.
- It should be optional.
Problem 2:
So we are moving straight to the Scanner Page. User scans the first pack of coffee.
And here’s the next tricky moment:
What if the app processes the scanned image for too long?
The possible reasons for that:
- Poor internet connection (and if all the data is taken from online resources, that might be a problem)
- Not enough storage on the device (not sure if this is still relevant today)
- The device is too far from the pack of coffee
- There’s not enough light
Conclusion 2:
- The app should not be dependent on the internet connection (but in that case we need to ask the user to upload the coffee data in advance, which is also not convenient)
- A requirement of the amount of free space while installing the app (space required)
- Short reminder while opening the scanner about the distance to the object and the sufficient amount of light
At this moment I decided to work on a new user flow, keeping in mind the conclusions I’ve come to.
And here’s what I received this time (Variant 2):
https://app.flowmapp.com/share/0b75ecd6d7a5d7df2b82e4b445331dff/userflow/14141
And then reworked into Variant 3 where:
- the user already knows how to scan (it’s not a new user, but the one who has already used the app)
- omitted complicated steps trying to ease a user’s life
And moved on to the Information Architecture step:
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1-5CqfHsGFw5-VvkoB0qlR4jmjVGZFGV8vORkr_liICQ/edit
And then into prototyping: https://app.moqups.com/alexandra.s.belskaya@gmail.com/0PcuBQGPBP/view
While working on that, I came across lots of questions and problems I tried to solve. And here’s a list of them.
- What should be the first screen?
The main question was whether a Scanner screen should be activated or not from the start.
Trying to find an answer to this question, I turned on to the experience of other scanning app. The closes being QR / Barcode Scanner.
And here’s what I found out:
- some apps (like QR Code Reader · by TinyLab) have a home screen
- while there are those like QR Code Reader where you get straight into scanning mode
Keeping in mind the idea that my task is to help users get what they want in the most clear, convenient and fast way, I came to a conclusion the best option would be to have Scanner screen from the start. This way a user gets access to the main option from the start without any extra steps.
To be continued …
