Meet Barri - Your digital barista
Learnings from the making of our first Messenger chatbot.
At MotionPass, one of the hDock42’s running projects, we strive to connect consumers in a specific location, with the businesses and services nearby, allowing them to find, order and pay for services instantly while consumption happens “on-the-go”. By now, we have developed two use cases. Although they both use our very same platform in the backend, they offer a completely different user experience.
The first of the is OpenToll — an integrated app for cars that improves user experience when paying for highway tolls, registering for congestion charges, or paying for parking. You can find more on OpenToll in one of our previous journals. Today we are here to talk about Barri. His mission is to cashlessly serve you your favourite cup of coffee in a nearby café, saving you the valuable queuing time . And he does that in the way which is so familiar to the majority of consumers — as a Messenger chatbot.
Barri has proved himself as a perfect use case for our mobile payment platform. Not only because of his good looks, but mostly because he is so intuitive to use. The initial camaraderie with Barri starts with you either liking our Barri Facebook page, or simply scanning the promotional QR code, which brings you directly to our landing page where the digital barista himself, flashes out. Once you start chatting with him, he automatically checks if one of the contracted partner coffee shop is in your area (for this use case, we have chosen partner coffee shops in Berlin and Prague). The finalization of the order is then just a matter of few taps.
In order to make Barri as user-friendly as possible, we have invited potential users to join a focus group that would test the process flow and the intuitiveness of use. Initially, we have used “Talk to Barri” as a call to action. Unexpectedly for us, 80% of the people simply decided to vocally trigger the bot, talking at the mobile screen, awaiting for Barri to be activated on the spot and getting on with their coffee case. Judging by the amount of our users look, portraying a semi-persistence facial expression of them, taking the correct action, we had to gently step in.
Our lesson learned, when pre-ordering a coffee and the instruction says ‘talk’ then the outcome of the user action is talking. Perhaps, this particular testing helped us to be informed of the trend that goes far beyond texting, and should have a future adjustment. The voice over function embedded in. So who knows, maybe the already existing Alexa could get a new buddy very soon, your voice-called to action digital barista — Barri.
Wanna check out Barri? Visit his homepage at Barri.io.
PS: Please note that Barri currently works in beta-mode only in limited area in Berlin (Germany), which was a perfect testing ground due to large number of privately owned coffee shops and very deep running roots of coffee shop culture. Follow Barri on Facebook in order to be informed about his next steps.
