Design a differentiated coffee experience that meets the needs of the customer and a matching memorable brand identity with the potential to scale.
Through understanding the needs and motivations of the target customer and mapping their journeys, I created opportunities for a standout customer experience through a desirable product offering, functional digital experience, and a memorable brand to rally behind.
As a nod to an essential landmark in the heart of Minneapolis, Falls Coffee builds its identity around a universal element of coffee and life—water.
Imagery from the nearby creek and waterfall generates repeated elements of the identity through movement and flow.
Rather than rely on my own personal subjective experience and biases, I wanted to hear directly from potential customers to give them a voice in creating a better user experience.
Using an interactive Miro board to drive our discussion, I sat down with 8 local coffee drinkers to understand their needs, motivations, preferences, and behaviors around visiting coffee shops around the city.
My goal was to use these discussion to map their preferences and behaviors and ensure the new shop aligned with this desired experience.
Because I had a limited amount of time with my participants, I chose to include a card sort activity to gain quick insights into what they felt were the most important factors when making a decision to visit a coffee shop. I assigned a weight to each to separate the extreme ends of the spectrum and give focus to priority areas for action.
I outlined the key insights from each category to help my client and I to drive decisions and tied them back to direct user quotes from the interviews.
I used an affinity map to synthesize notes from the interviews. This helped to cluster feedback into main themes, insights, and opportunities to design for a positive experience across the product, physical space, and brand.
The next step was to translate these insights into actionable steps for the client. This was done through exploring solutions to the insight or pain point through how might we statements before making a recommended action.
This is a messy part of the process. Insights don't always translate directly to an obvious action. My approach was to take the insight and brainstorm several ways to solve for the pain point. I then combed through and made decisions based on on the feasibility of what we could create as well as the potential positive impact this could have.
Through my interviews and ethnographic observations of the extremely popular surrounding area area of the new shop, I built a clearer picture of our ideal audience and the market opportunity. Rather than build an experience and product for EVERYONE, it was helpful to break these down into targeted segments.
I built 4 personas to help me define our customers and ensure our product offering and experiences met the unique needs of these individuals.
From my interviews, I mapped a common journey for each user type. This quickly helped me visualize the entire cycle of behaviors from early awareness all the way to ways of creating customer loyalty.
With a better understanding of the core functionalities of the website, I built a site map that helped structure the pages to give our users quick, frictionless access to the information they were seeking.
At this stage I used low fidelity wireframes to quickly explore ways to present the most vital information for the user like a gallery of the physical space, drink specials, and menu items.
Having a quick visual representation of these items helped drive collaboration with the client and helped us align on a path forward going into the beginning of the website build.
