Founder - Creative Lead, UXUI Design, UX Research, Interaction Design, Visual Design, User Flows, Rapid Prototyping
3 weeks – Currently evolving from an independent project idea, to a fully equipped digital solution that I'm actively building.
Many small and medium-sized cafes struggle to compete with large corporations like Starbucks and Dunkin due to a lack of resources for developing custom digital platforms for order placement, payment processing, and rewards tracking.
I led the end-to-end design of a user-friendly iOS applications' dashboard, that delivers an easily customizable interface that cafes can tailor to their brands. This project laid the foundation for launching a comprehensive application tailored for these businesses.
As I dove into discovery I took to google and chatGPT to construct client personas based on informed assumptions about our potential clients. The goal was to gain an understanding of a range of coffee shop owners who each have unique goals and face distinct challenges in the market place.
Reflecting on the insight gathered while putting together our client personas I then used the same methods to develop three personas to reflect Joe, Sofia’s and Michaels customers who would ultimately be the end users of the application. This part of my discovery process was not only about making educated assumptions but also about fostering a genuine connection to the people who would ultimately engage with our application.
Informed by the unique goals and challenges that I identified for our client personas and the preferences of their customers, I set out to research the digital strategies of leading competitors in the food and beverage industry using the App store & Mobbin.com to support my research.
Starbucks, Dunkin', McDonald's, and Chipotle
My findings revealed a range of user-centric functionalities designed to enhance the customer experience and streamline operations, aligning with our personas’ objectives.
For instance, features like mobile order-ahead and loyalty programs resonate with Alex’s need for speed and efficiency, as well as Emily's desire for rewards. At the same time, the easy navigation and branded experiences provided by these apps are something that can appeal to Joe’s and Sofia’s goals of creating recognizable and inviting coffee shop atmospheres. Meanwhile, the option to browse and search menus caters to Jordan’s search for new flavors and café experiences.
Each app presented a distinct approach, some focusing on gamification to increase engagement, others on personalization to foster brand loyalty. What stood out was their collective aim to make the customer’s journey as frictionless as possible — a principle that I aspire to embody in our application to help Michael with his franchise aspirations and to support Joe and Sofia in competing with larger chains while maintaining their unique brand identity.
As I began the process of conceptualizing the central dashboard and integrating the identified features and content, I anchored my strategy in a set of foundational design principles.
Design the app's navigation with the goal of making it feel familiar and intuitive to new users while allowing for easy customization to maintain each client's unique brand identity. Use common patterns and recognizable icons to guide users effortlessly to their desired destination within the app.
Establish a versatile design system that prioritizes simplicity and allows elements like color schemes, typography, and graphical elements to be easily adjusted to align with the client's branding. This ensures a coherent user experience that feels both personalized and part of the client’s brand family.
Embrace an inclusive design approach that ensures the content is readable and navigable for everyone, including users with disabilities. Implementing a logical structure for content, providing text alternatives for visual elements, and ensuring high contrast and resizable text will make the app usable by a wide audience, regardless of ability.
I recruited five participants in their 20s, all of whom had experience with food and beverage applications. I approached the study as a mix between user interviews and card sorting exercises.
First, I worked through their background and familiarity with mobile apps that might have been relevant.
Secondly, I presented them with a low-fidelity dashboard that was scrubbed of all navigational labels and asked the participants to express what they expected each navigational icon to do.
I also took the time to examine whether the navigational icons' placement matched their expectations and delved into the rewards, menu, and featured sections, exploring how they expected content to be displayed.
The goal was to fine-tune the layout and content strategy so that we could always provide a consistently smooth user experience to the users of the café application.
The test yielded several useful findings regarding the app's navigation and content presentation:
Thanks to the user research insights, I had a pretty good idea of the items that needed to live on the dashboard and their respective locations. With this understanding, I crafted a design system that blends consistency with the flexibility needed for individual branding.
To achieve this, I developed a constrained design system that could be re outfitted for each cafe owners branding needs. This system maintains consistent grid layouts, spacing, shadow effects, and iconography (to a degree), as-well as button formats. However clients would have the option to update the typefaces & color scheme and pick between core components for each section of the dashboard empowering our cafe owners to create distinct experiences for their users.
The final designs reflect a modular dashboard that has been customized to match three different café owners' brands. Each café owner has the ability to choose their heading and paragraph fonts and to add their brand's custom color palette.
Because each component is based on the same design system, we're able to apply the color schemes in a consistent manner so that neutrals, primary, and accents are appropriately applied. Café owners really have the most power with customization when it comes to entering their product pictures, even being able to choose the aspect ratio of their thumbnails.
Due to its well-defined constraints, café owners do not need to invest excessive time and energy in starting from scratch, and their users can access all the familiar features they expect from larger competitors, such as ordering for pickup, rewards programs, scanning and payment, and locating stores.
Diving into the food and beverage industry's approach to mobile app communications and exploring how the experience can be optimized to improve the user experience of their customers was immensely rewarding.
With this case study, my goal was to reflect the high-level process that I took from the point of having an idea, to understanding the problem space, ideating, testing, and finally creating a focused minimum viable product.
Because this was an independent project, I didn't have much of a budget for fully fledged usability/user testing, so I had to get creative by reaching out to some of my close friends on my social media platforms.
I also had to battle with time as I only gave myself 2 weeks to execute this idea, while balancing my other projects. However, by constraining myself to only designing the dashboard interface, I was able to streamline the process while making sure that all other insights that I gathered could be properly backlogged as next steps.
Around the time of my user interviews/card sorting exercise, I decided that I really enjoyed this project and would love to see it actually be adopted by cafes.
I'm currently in the process of leading the design and user experience of the rest of this Software as a Service application.
This includes everything from onboarding to payment and check-out experiences to also designing a client-facing dashboard that allows them to easily modify their unique white-label application.
