Case Study: Improving the Coffee Shop Experience
Walking into a cafe and not knowing what to order can be intimidating. Here’s my solution for new coffee drinkers.
As a UX design student, I am passionate about improving user experiences. I find myself constantly analyzing the world around me, looking for ways to improve existing systems to better serve user needs. As I work my way through college as a barista, I have come across many opportunities to help the small cafe I work for run smoother. In this article I will go into detail about one particular need I identified for new coffee drinkers and how I am seeking to make our customer’s experience better.
A little Background
I work at one of three cafes in the bustling little city of Provo, Utah. Some might think it’s weird that a city with over 100,000 residents has only three coffee shops, but in a city that consists of almost 90% Mormons (a religion that discourages the consumption of coffee), it makes a little more sense. Because of this, many of our customers are people trying coffee for the first time, which means that many of them don’t know anything about coffee at all.
Identifying the Need
We get countless customers who come in not knowing anything about coffee at all… it is not uncommon to have customers ask about every single drink on the menu.
Considering the culture and demographics here, we get a lot of questions about our menu. Our baristas do their best to answer the questions, but it is not uncommon to have customers ask about every single drink on the menu. This is not only tedious for the barista (especially on busy days), but it almost guarantees that the customer will not remember the difference between all the drinks the next time they come in.
That led me to ask the questions: if so many people have so many questions, how many out there are too intimidated to ask; and how can we better serve our customers who don’t know much about what we offer?
I realized we needed a better method for distributing relevant information in a memorable, easy-to-process way.
Research
Once I realized the need, I started doing a bit of research. Two of the most helpful things I did were:
1. I spoke to my fellow baristas to hear what questions they were frequently asked, and
2. I looked at what other coffee shops were doing to inform their customers.
Here is what I learned through each phase of research:
Some of our most frequently asked questions include what lattes and americanos are.
By speaking to other baristas, I found that a lot of the them were asked the same questions everyday, the most common being: What’s the difference between light and dark roast coffee; what is a latte; and what is an americano?
Some of these questions seem pretty basic, but again, consider our market.
I found that a lot of coffee shops used infographics to demonstrate what goes into their drinks. This provides a quick, easy answer to customer questions.
When I looked into what other shops were doing, I found that a lot of them created infographic posters to demonstrate what goes into their drinks. I really liked this approach because it allows a quick, easy to understand option to find out what goes into each beverage. I found that many of them did not answer all of our most common questions, so while I gleaned some good ideas, I knew that for our market I knew I wanted to provide a bit more information.
Ideation
I spoke with the cafe owner and we decided that a pamphlet would be the best design solution.
After completing my market research I began ruminating on potential solutions. I spoke to the owner of the shop to hear what she thought might be best and together we decided that a pamphlet would be the best approach. We considered doing a poster or even an online interactive guide that we could display on our website or POS tablets, but we thought that the pamphlet would be the most readily accessible, enable the customers to take it with them, and would allow us the real estate in the design to go into detail about our most frequently asked questions.
From there I began sketching out ideas, focusing on how to answer the most pressing customer questions. I also took some photos of the shop to make sure my design fit the mood and aesthetic of the shop. Here are a few photos of the shop:
Design
After all my research and ideation, I was finally ready to bring my vision to life. I am currently at the design stage of the process and have plans to complete it within the next week and a half. Below is a sneak peak of the design.
After completing the design I will present it to my client. I have plans as well to print a small batch in order to perform usability testing with shop customers. I will update this article accordingly upon completion of the project!
