The Daily Grind

This is a technical test I did for Lingbe. I asked for permission to post it here and they agreed so here it goes.

The challenge

The premises given where the following:

1. Task – Coffee shop Project

1.1. Brief
Your assessment is to design an app to order and deliver coffee. You have to create:
• Flowchart.
• Wireframes.
• UI of the key pages.
1.2. The app details:
Product Name: The Daily Grind
Purpose: It is a coffee ordering app for Android or Ios.
Rules: The shop serves only one type of coffee (you can choose whichever you like)
– User can choose to add: 0-2 milk packets
– User can choose to add: 0-2 sugar packets
– User can choose size: Small, Medium, Large.
Delivery:
1) You can have them deliver the coffee to your location within 30 minutes
2) You can set a time to go pick up the coffee at their location.

2. How will this be evaluated?

• On the quality of visual/ interaction design: Is it attractive and appropriate?
• Is information architecture correct? Is it easy to use?
• User Experience: Have you considered the design from the user’s perspective, needs and context?

The Project

Total time invested (estimate): 22 hours.

I started by creating a Blueprint, a fast and useful tool to make clear what I wanted to do.
After that, I did some field research (investigating coffee and its users) and did a few
interviews, which helped me build a simple User Persona. I came up with some problems
people face daily when drinking coffee:

● Low quality coffee
● No time or will to go for a good coffee
● Lack of trust in online stores
● Types of milk and sugar

Based on this, I decided to go with a “Premium” feeling while still giving the user a fast and easy way to get their coffee. As to the types of milk and sugar (soy milk etc.), it was left for a future iteration, considering that the project doesn’t even allow the user to choose more than one type of coffee.

I performed a competitive analysis to get ideas about functionalities and also set a starting point for the UI phase. During the ideation phase I came up with some insights that I filtered using a MOSCOW, deciding which ones were top priority.

‘Must have’ ideas:

● Save order preferences or past orders
● Save locations
● Buy a number of coffees instead of just one
● See your order status
‘Should have’ ideas:
● Referral system
● Add comments for the rider
‘Could have’ ideas:
● Points fidelization system
● Random cute messages when ordering
● Company orders

‘Won’t have’ ideas:
● Social features (share, raffles or contests among instagram coffee publications)

All of these ideas are valid but due to different reasons (implementation cost, low UX
benefits etc.) some of them were left out. One idea stood out, though: Ordering several
coffees in a single order seemed to be key business-wise, but it wasn’t mentioned in the
briefing.

The reason this is important is because the process other Apps follow when ordering food with add-ons (like the milk and sugar packets in this case) is a sequential one specific for each product, meaning that every time you add something to the cart you have to choose the add-on. It is a slow process, but necessary.

While this makes total sense for them, the tiny amount and variety of options in thisproject allowed for a faster system: instead of adding a maximum of 2 packets of sugar and 2 packets of milk every time the user adds a cup of coffee to the cart, it would be possible to add all the cups of coffee and then add a maximum of 2 times the number of cups. This would be way faster, which would be a huge improvement for big orders, which, in turn, are the most profitable ones.

But this improvement comes at a cost, too, with the user having to count and take notes of what people want before actually interacting with the App. This would certainly lead to more mistakes. Moreover, the Coffee Shop workers wouldn’t know which Coffee size is the one that was ordered with a milk packet, affecting the packaging. It is not necessarily a big deal, but packaging is important for a good Premium feeling, and that was one of the priorities.

After some thinking and testing, I came up with another way of speeding up the process: a design that allowed to add the coffee with the add-ons in a single screen. It isn’t as fast as the idea previously mentioned, but has no down-sides.
I created the user flow for the entire application: