When is my next delivery?

(or: when your customer’s calendar is the best interface)

A few months back I noticed there was one question I was asked most often on Slack or elsewhere by people getting coffee delivered from Sample.

When is my next coffee due?

We made some simple changes to try and make this more clear (rewording the message on the top of every page of the website; and setting the next shipping date as the topic in our open Slack group) but it was still happening.

My next thought was tragically hip: what about a chat bot? I mean, people were basically using me as a chat bot by asking that.

But the task of getting people to set up and understand a chat bot is complicated, and our customers are a mix of ages and technical experience.

Then I realised a more obvious answer.

The place people already go to answer questions about dates and times. Something most people are used to. You don’t need to be on Facebook, you don’t need to know what a bot is and the specific phrasing it expects.

Their calendar app.

We’re slowly rolling it out, but now after people set up their coffee deliveries, they see a message which invites them to add deliveries to their calendar.

Under the hood I’m using the iCalendar gem for Ruby (and some other bits) to handle the grunt work of formatting and generating the calendar files.

It’s a bit of a messy UX because there are so many possible apps, but using the webcal: link format works for most, and I’m specifically calling out Google Calendar with it’s own link because in my informal survey group it was the most common underlying platform.

Their calendar now shows their next shipping day, and once it’s been shipped that date is updated with tracking information so they can check on their delivery.

Once Australia Post marks their delivery as due for delivery that day, their calendar feed gets an extra all-day event telling them their coffee is due. If they decide to pause their deliveries until a future shipping day, their calendar updates to reflect the new date.

It’s easy, automatically updates, and works without having to learn new apps and commands.

Sometimes the best UX is adapting your app to what someone else is already doing.

Sample Coffee Roasters is a small coffee roaster in Sydney, Australia. We celebrate great coffee in our cafes and send a different coffee to your door anywhere in Australia every two or four weeks with our coffee deliveries, telling the story of each coffee and the producers around the world who made it.