Portfolio

Coffee Hunter Android App UX Research and Design

• Product name: Coffee Hunter
• Devices: Android mobile
• My Role: UX research (qualitative and quantitative), UX Writing, UX Design
• Teams involved: Product Owners, Developers
• Tools: Affinity Design, Adobe Suite, Google Suite

Challenges

The motivation behind the client’s request was to design an app in the footsteps of Untappd for beer but for coffee lovers and businesses. Adapting this requests to the particularities of the coffee industry was the first requirement, closely followed by an UI and colour palette that would have earthy colours and a nostalgic look.

Pain Points

Users lack a specific app that could help them discover great spots to drink the coffee they desire. Knowing the type, origins, taste profile, prices, and brewing methods without physically being on the spot is next to impossible today. Coffee drinkers need to rely on a generic Maps app, with a variable amount of information.

Coffee businesses on the other hand would need to build their own website and promote it to potential customers to inform them of how exactly their coffee is brewed and from where it is sourced. Most drinkers would not bother browsing all the websites of nearby coffee spots, even if they were all easily reachable and findable. The main pain point to address was thus to have a design that would fit all the required information, was easy to navigate, while remaining uncluttered.

Value Proposition

An app with integrated map, search features, and listings that allows users to quickly and directly look for the intended type of product via a variety of filters including: location, coffee origin, roasting level, serving method, sourcing, reviews.

For business users, features would include: listing creation, editing, and self-promotion (photo, video).

The main value of the app would be its unicity, as no direct competitors were identified for the intended geographic area to be covered by the app.

The Process

After better understanding the objectives, motivations, and requirements of the project, a prolonged yet budget limited research stage was initiated with the goal of establishing the potential competitors, the intended target, and users’ needs and frustrations.

The competitive audit (see screenshot below) identified 3 direct competitors on the Android platform. During interviews with potential users, a fourth competitor was identified and added to the list.

All the direct competitors had important limitations. Either a limited amount of features, or lack of specific filters within the app, or the product was downright faulty. This helped us establish a first risk in allowing users to add new cafes without a moderator’s oversight: it would have been too easy to insert spam or unrelated businesses. A new requirement also emerged in the need of categorizing not just the serving options but the coffee bean features as well.

In person and remote interviews, concept testing, and the competitive audit resulted in the creation of Empathy Maps, User Personas and Journeys. From these, Needs, Hypothesis Statements and a Value Proposition were created.

Then the design stage started by defining the Information Architecture and wireframing it on paper. Work on the UI started reflecting these decisions. Meanwhile a Brand Style Guide was also created to steer the UI and UX into the required direction. Finally, the whole UI was sketched and moved to a series of Hi-Fi mock ups using Affinity.

The design was then discussed with the engineer. The working prototypes were then tested with the users via Surveys and Five Seconds testing. The originally created visual elements were adjusted according to the results from the testing phase, creating a more intuitive, accessible and streamlined design.

First UX Design of the app before the application of adjustments.

New mock-ups were also delivered to the client, to keep the project aligned to business requirements. Once the direction was approved and made clear to the engineering team, the app was moved into the developing stage. Product Owners were provided with a Post-Launch testing program to carry out by their team.

Solution

The desired design for the Coffee Hunter app was completed and fully approved by the client despite the results of the research excluding some of the original requests. The engineering team confirmed the capability and factuality of the design.

Final UX Design of the home page.