Hujir Shohadai - Product Designer (UX, UI, Web)

Project overview

Coffice is the easy to use App that allows you and your staff members to quickly order drinks and snacks remotely and get them delivered from your local cafeteria/canteen without ever having to leave your desk. The idea was developed as a project during a 5 days design Sprint at GA in 2018, in London.

Hypothesis building

Me and two more designers based our project on the assumption that employees' life within the office environment could be made easier by offering alternative ways to get coffees and teas while on their breaks, instead of having to interrupt their work and physically go to their local cafeteria/canteen to have a drink. In order to help staff members manage their time better between their work loads and their breaks, our hypothesis became that an App to order drinks and snacks remotely would make office life a little bit easier for employees and would help businesses maximise resources, save time and improve productivity.

First round of interviews

We decided to start by interviewing 4 people who met demographics in order to collect some feedback about our hypothesis. During our first round of interviews we've learned user's general behaviours, habits and opinions about their break times at work and about how useful would they find our App idea. The insights we gathered during the interview phase were very useful in order to understand user's needs and frustrations within different work environments and also helped us identify our primary persona.

Main takeaways were:

Based on specific working conditions (office size, population and type of infrastructure) some people found sometimes hard having to leave their desk to go and queue for a coffee
Busy work schedules and long meetings seemed to make it hard to find the time to enjoy a warm cup of tea or coffee during working hours
On the other hand some users revealed that coffee or tea breaks were a good opportunity for them to leave the office for few minutes, to socialise with other colleagues, to detach from the office job and let their hair down for few minutes - for these reasons some users disliked the idea of an App to order drinks and snacks remotely.

Persona

Based on our findings we were able to identify the Persona we should be targeting with our solution and the ideal context/work environment in which the user would take more advantages out of the App. Nadine's personality, goals and frustrations within the use case we depicted for her were a direct result of the interview's findings.

Quick competitor analysis

A Features inventory research based on specific tools and services generally used by well-known brands within the food and drink industry has helped us identify which set of features and services our MVP should be offering to users.

A heuristic evaluation of competitors similar Apps led us to a Pluses and Deltas analysis which brought to light features and flows of this type of products. It helped us understand what could be improved and gave us new ideas for the initial MVP in terms of usability and UI look and feel.

User flow

We then designed a User flow which outlined the steps a user would have to take within the MVP in order to complete a purchase. At this stage the so called "Happy journey" was potentially achievable in 5 steps. This entire process helped massively highlight procedural thinking over the interface design and uncover potential friction points within the journey.

Prototype and testing

First Wireframes and Paper prototypes during the ideation phase helped us to collaboratively design solutions for our MVP. The different deliverables were then used to quickly test the user flow and the results allowed us to identify the best strategy to follow. Only few small details needed to be revised so we could proceed with the creation of a digital version of the same prototype.

I've designed a Medium-fidelity prototype which was great to communicate design vision and getting early feedback. After further usability tests we went through another round of iterations. We tested this early prototype recruiting 3 people at the cafeteria in the premises and asked them to complete a series of tasks so we could then measure the results. All issues were fixed and retested until we were ready to move on to the high-fidelity designs.

More testing and iterations

After designing the High-fidelity prototype, we realised that by showing categories of products on top of the page and listing content of the list below in the same page we would allow the process of selecting an item to be quicker and easier than we previously envisaged. Considered the importance for us to ensure the most intuitive journey possible, we were determined to further amend the flow by re-designing the prototype once again and run more tests. The new design was actually worth the effort. Users found the App extremely intuitive and very quick to use.

Also, a progressive Onboarding process came handy to collect user’s information, preferred payment method and closest cafeteria to their office location.

Prototype delivery

As a result of the work done, the Coffice App concept turned out to be an extremely practical solution. With only 4 clicks from the initial login page a user could purchase and customise a drink and get it delivered on his/her own desk as soon as ready. A "Click and collect" option would also be available for those users whom wanted to avoid the queue, but still get out of the office for a short break.