Overview 🔎
Coffee contributes to the culture at many colleges, which is why creating an app to connect with the local community and place group orders would be widely used by students.
Problem & Solution 🤝
Problem: Busy students need a more accurate and efficient way to place multiple coffee orders because inputting orders individually takes too much time and can lead to mistakes.
Solution: The Campus Cafe app is personalized for Northwestern University students to place and pick up orders from partnering cafes located on campus and in the nearby downtown area. The app aims to accurately show popular times, seating availability, and walking distance to inform students of their options before they order so that they can streamline the process of group ordering for club meetings and study sessions.
Goals/Requirements:
• User Interviews - To build a design that would address user needs, I conducted user interviews with students which helped me to gain a deeper understanding of the difficulties they encounter when ordering coffee.
• Competitive Audit - I completed an audit to compare the unique features and offerings of popular coffee apps, as well as an app specific to Northwestern University.
• Storyboards - From the gathered information, I created a big picture storyboard to contextualize the journey the user would take when using this app in their daily lives, and a close up storyboard to focus on the product and define what screens I’d need to design for that journey.
Process 🛣
I applied insights from my initial research into a high-fidelity prototype, which I tested on 5 participants. Their feedback was organized into an affinity diagram to group results into themes and determine priority revisions. Each color represents one user.
Results 🎁
I then iterated my designs into a final prototype: https://xd.adobe.com/view/2608fe13-c4a9-4068-9bbe-5e237a442de0-735b/?fullscreen
Takeaways 📣
I learned a lot about evaluating competitors’ designs and determining what to add, omit, or improve.
In the future, I can see this app modified for different universities that have a centralized network for student information, and I’d develop an onboarding flow where users are asked for permission to share their contact information or location because they might be hesitant to share private information and need to know their data is secure even in the context of a university-based app.
Lastly, I’d doA/B testing on the cafe screen to see if the final screen would lead to faster cafe selection, and higher conversions/click-through rates.
