Product Teardown: Starbucks mobile app
The purpose of a product teardown is to evaluate what has made a product successful (or not) based on how the product has set out to address a set of user problems and go to market. Strengthen your own product intuition and product sense by walking through our product teardowns with us.
Co-written with Amanda Song.
Context
This product teardown focuses on the Starbucks mobile app, which was first launched on iOS in 2009. As of 2019, Starbucks has 31,000 stores worldwide in 2019 and 15,000 in the US and launched their mobile app for IOS in 2009. We want to evaluate how well the app serves customer needs and Starbucks’s business goals.
The Starbucks app grew out of the Starbucks rewards program — this is also highlighted as the key value proposition of the app on their website.
What are the goals of the product?
[Kay] I see the app with a lot of different goals:
- To make buying their coffee more easy (obviously)
- To get users to join their rewards program (encourage customer loyalty and frequency)
- To collect user data to improve their offerings and services
- To make Starbucks a more integrated part of their customers’ lives and make it a habit
[Amanda] Agreed! I’d add one more big goal: encouraging customers to pre-load a Starbucks card with money. This has two benefits:
- Starbucks uses this money as an interest-free loan, with a total of $1.6 billion in 2019!
- This money is pre-committed from customers, i.e. they will spend this money at Starbucks
[Kay] That’s an interesting benefit! If I were to rank the goals, I think pre-committed money from customers is more of a secondary goal/benefit of the app to Starbucks, than a primary goal. The pre-committed money is more of a feature that feeds into their higher goal of creating customer loyalty and encouraging frequency.
We could clean up this list by comparing user goals the app needs to address versus the business goals Starbucks is trying to bake in:
Who is the target persona?
[Amanda] The audience of the app today would be Starbucks customers who want to earn rewards or the added convenience of paying with their Starbucks card and ordering ahead.
The order-ahead mobile experience probably attracts people who are more of the on-the-go type, such as in busy urban areas.
[Kay] Agreed! That said, at the same time, I don’t feel like the app is super exclusive to its target persona like some apps can be. With the Starbucks app and how it’s designed, you can see how accessibility is the main driver of its design. It wants to be simple and straightforward enough that anyone can easily order a drink. Anyone can convert to a Starbucks customer. I could see my mom (if my mom were a Starbucks drinker) even using the app just as my friends in their early twenties currently use the app. While the app pushes its rewards program, it’s not exclusive to its rewards members. I’m not a rewards member, but I can place an order just as easily.
How does the UI/UX of the app contribute to its features and purpose?
[Kay] I’m always really fascinated by what companies choose to be the main landing pages within an app because these can be seen as the columns of what the company finds most important (and hence what they want end users to use most).
Note if you’re not already a rewards member, the main landing page (home) is not to place an order, but information to try to lure you into signing up and joining their rewards program. Obviously selling coffee is a priority for them, but it’s even more important to them to entice you to join their loyalty program. I also like how it’s still SUPER obvious how to order even if I want to forgo making an account.
Absolutely one of my favorite aspects of this app is that I don’t need an account to start using the app. Even without an account the onboarding is super slick and smooth. This is definitely a strong assist to the top goal to simply sell more Starbucks and feeds well into the user goal to buy coffee (whether you’re a rewards member or not!). Additionally, I really love how easy it is to find stores near you and reset the menu according to specific stores.
[Amanda] One of the first things I noticed in the app was how much screen real estate was given to high-quality, up-close pictures of the menu items, and how drinks are shown in clear mugs, even though we sip them out of paper cups in reality. For a beverage and food company, of course, making your offerings enticing is key!
When your available space is as small as a phone, there are trade-offs at play.
For example, in the full menu view, the large image size limits only 4 items to be displayed at once, meaning the user has to do a lot of scrolling to see the full selection. On the plus side, you can see the details of each drink relatively well, and scrolling does highlight their range and variety of products.
On the detailed view for each item, the photo, once again, is front and center, taking up more than half the page!
Delight Factors
[Amanda] The app does so many things well!
Two I wanted to call out: the ease of (1) scanning in store and (2) reloading your Starbucks card
I love how the home screen has a button for “Scan in Store,” where you can bring up a barcode for your Starbucks card, which you can use to pay for your purchase. This anticipates my needs as a customer — if I’m popping open the app, the chances are I’m either going to pick something to order ahead or I’m already in the store and want to pay.
I also love that when the app is in the Scan mode, the screen automatically brightens. This is another detail that demonstrates the app creators thought about what the user likely needs at each step.
Every time I add something to my order, I also see a little confirmation, which includes a picture of the item. That’s a nice detail that helps me understand what is going on, given that the drink names can often be quite long.
Their logic for prompting you to reload your card is pretty genius.
What could success metrics for the app be?
[Kay] One potential success metric I’d see for them is % of sales that come in via the app. Just by the app alone you can tell how technology-focused this company is and based on how they’ve configured their stores I think they’re also trying to shepherd more customers into adopting their technology.
[Amanda] One problem with this is that it might set up an incentive structure that isn’t ideal. For example, if you just want to optimize to increase the % of sales that come through the app, you could technically do so easily if you stopped stocking Safeways with Starbucks or if you stopped selling Starbucks gift cards in stores. Note, with current events such as the pandemic, you may also see false positives since people are currently not allowed to dine indoors and prefer to-go options.
A revenue-based metric for the app could be the number of mobile orders (to approximate how much net-new business the app brings in) and how overall sales have changed since launching the app.
If I were the PM for this app, the biggest question I would want to answer is: In what ways can this app complement or contribute to the overall strategy of the business? This would include, of course, the number of orders made through the app, the number of gift cards purchased, but also things higher up in the funnel, like how many people are aware of the new products Starbucks is pushing each season.
Given Starbucks’s investments in the in-store experience (friendly baristas, inviting decor and atmosphere, music via Spotify), I would also be interested in how customers move from using the app to visiting the store.
Starbucks can track revenue for three main user segments, based on their purchasing behavior, and each bucket can be further divided between rewards and non-rewards members:
- Customers who only order in-store and have never used the app
- Customers who only order with the app
- Customers who order both in-store and with the app
You could break down the above cohorts even further based on rewards members and non-rewards members.
The other classic consumer metrics to track would be:
- User adoption — number of new installs, updates
- User engagement — daily active users (DAU), monthly active users (MAU). Engagement can be further broken down along the various features: you can measure the MAU of mobile orders, adding money to their cards, buying gift cards, redeeming rewards, interacting with push notifications, purchasing featured or promoted items.
- User retention — what % of users return to the app after a week of installing it? After a month?
What features would we remove, add, or change?
[Kay] As a PM, you’re always looking for how you can enhance your product or service to make it even better for your users. I’d say as an early-in-career PM, when you’re first learning the ropes and your space, the easiest “quick wins” to immediately start adding to your product are incremental. One way to find these quick wins is to consider whether there are points of friction in the current experience.
[Amanda] That’s true. At the same time, really great PMs push companies through rallying the team around big bets: are there important, unarticulated customer needs that you can shine a light on? Are there uncharted yet promising territories that can open up whole new branches of business? One example that comes to mind is when Sundar Pichai advocated for Google to enter the browser space with Chrome.
[Kay] Let’s go over some potential heftier changes to demonstrate this exercise. We’ll also cover some incremental changes that could qualify as “quick wins” if you were a new PM on the Starbucks app.
New feature ideas
I want to go back to Amanda’s point about the goals of the app and how they connect to the higher level goals of the company. From looking at the higher goal, how can we connect them to specific user problems?
Starbucks’s higher goal is that it wants to sell more coffee. To do that, it can either increase the frequency of purchases by its current existing customers or acquire new customers. Note, improving the app and the experience according to each of these groups will be different because they each have different sets of pain points.
For its current existing customers, how can we create a more immersive coffee drinking experience? Drawing on Amanda’s earlier point, how can we connect the app to the in-store experience and create a more immersive experience?
[Amanda] Perhaps we could do something with the music or wifi setup of the store to create a stronger link between the app and the store. For example, if you can scan a code from the app that automatically signs you on to wifi, or you could scan a code that would automatically link you to the music playlist in the store.
[Kay] Another customer group we could look at are the at home coffee drinkers, folks who buy the beans and make coffee at home. What if the app had in-app tutorials specifically for their at home products? Such as how to make cold brew with certain beans or how to make an americano.
Incremental changes
[Amanda] One design decision I’m not sure I understand: the behavior on the homescreen. As far as I can tell, the cards here are meant to showcase new or featured items.
Tapping on the card, though, adds the item directly to my order, which I did not expect. I would have thought it would open to the full description of that item.
Adding it immediately to an order feels sudden and aggressive, especially given that there is a dedicated ‘Order Now’ button on that card. If I didn’t tap that button, it’s fair to assume I did not intend to buy it.
[Kay] Eep! Agreed, that’s pretty frustrating as a user, especially when there’s an “Order Now” button that’s already so big and obvious.
As a user who isn’t yet onboarded into the rewards program, the app feels text heavy where they’re writing out and explaining things to me about the rewards program more than letting me not think. The scan page is kind of a wall of text and honestly I just want someone to hold my hand and show me what I’m supposed to do. I could easily continually skip this page every time I order coffee as a non-registered user because I don’t want to deal with the hassle of reading out the onboarding process.
Also, it isn’t clear to me based on this page when I gain when signing up for their rewards program. I wish I knew more specifics about what I’d gain from the rewards program. As the casual Starbucks customer I am, is the exchange rate high enough for it to be worth for me to sign up?
I really love how their desktop site lays out the rewards program and wish they did something similar with all that space in the app. They even have click through examples of what you can exchange for points of different magnitudes.
Final Thoughts
[Kay] Overall I’m a big fan of their app! In many ways, it’s super frictionless and intuitive. You can tell their team has made very thoughtful and customer-centric design decisions. The design is beautiful yet simple. Perhaps for me the #1 area of improvement I see is strengthening their onboarding into their rewards program (which seems to be one of their prized metrics as it’s the home page of the app).
[Amanda] The app definitely positions Starbucks as a frontrunner of loyalty programs in the food/restaurant space, in terms of its feature set and intuitive and modern design.
What are your thoughts on this product teardown? Let us know by leaving a comment below! :)
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