User research
Content Strategy
UX Writing
UI Design
Usability Testing
User research
Low-fidelity prototype
User testing
Figma
Miro
Maze
Zoom
Asana
Google Surveys
Week 1: Discover
Week 2: Define
Week 3: Develop
The Client
The client, a long-time bar veteran, Brice Cothran wanted us to create a platform for patrons of a bar to be able to order and schedule drinks from their phones to create happy customers and well-tipped bartenders.
The Problem Statement
Patrons need a way to order drinks without having to waste so much time and energy at a crowded bar.
The Solution
Create an application that allows customers to order drinks from their favorite bars on their phones.
Competitive Analysis
We studied the landscape looking for competitors that focused exclusively on serving patrons of bars but there were none found. Indirect competitors (Postmates, Uber Eats, and Drizly) provided models and patterns that influenced onboarding, search, checkout flows. Postmates and Uber Eats have intuitive ordering and checkout flows as well as efficient delivery statuses but no option to order food for dine-in or have cocktails delivered. Drizly's strength is that it delivers alcohol but it's weakness is it can only be from stores.
User Survey
47 bar patrons responded to the survey launched. I authored questions aimed to understand people’s behaviors when going out for drinks and to gain key insights for further questioning in interviews.
If a bartender took over 5 minutes to get to you and then took over 5 minutes to deliver your drink how much would you tip?
If a bartender took over 10 minutes to get to you and then took over 10 minutes to deliver your drink how much would you tip?
If a bar was really busy and drinks were taking a long time, would that affect your choice of drink to order?
Has the amount of time it takes to order a drink at bar affected how long you chose to stay?
Target Audience
We found that our target audience was mostly females and males between the ages of 21-40 who go out once every week to 2 weeks.
User Interviews
We set up 3 interviews to gain deeper insights into data gathered from the surveys. I crafted questions aimed to find out more about who our potential users are and how we could specifically help them with our product.
* Our main findings from the surveys and interviews were that...
1. Patrons find that ordering drinks often times can be a major hindrance from their intended goal of spending quality time with friends.
2. People whose jobs focus on customer or client care go out to feel "treated."
3. That if people knew how long drinks would take, and had more control of the process, they would have a much better experience.
Persona
Our user persona has pain points and goals that reflect those of our target audience. Their frustrations are the lack of time getting to connect with the people they are out with and having to put so much energy into being served after a long week of work.
Journey Mapping
The journey map helped us contextualize our persona’s pain points and shed light on where our product would solve the patron’s needs.
Pain Points
We used the pain points highlighted in the journey map and turned them into How Might We statements. This helped us come up with our user stories in week two.
User Stories
I created and prioritized user stories based on the top How Might We statements to base our user flows off of to keep us with in our project’s scope. The ones that ran parallel to the business requirements took highest priority.
User Flows
I came up with 4 simple and intuitive user flows in response to the user stories before constructing wireframes.
Storyboard
I sketched up a storyboard of our persona Ann on a similar journey as our map but this time using our product.
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Ann waits at a crowded bar to or drinks and notices other people across the bar just walking up and grabbing drinks with their phones out.
She decides to do some quick research and finds Barfly. She decides to download it and try it out.
She is immediately prompted to scan her ID upon opening the application.
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Her and her friends want to go somewhere else and she decides to try Barfly out.
Once they all decide where they want to go, she orders everyone's drinks for when they want to get there.
They arrive at the next bar on time and she gets an alert notifying her that the drinks are ready. They walk up to the bar and see their drinks.
We used this part of the process to get creative and start sketching. Putting the pen to paper helped us get more inspiration for our initial wireframes.
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We did crazy 8’s to quickly pull out as many ideas for the most important screens and then compared them as a group.
Variations of the ‘home’ screen
Variations of the ‘destination’ screen
Paper Prototype
Next, we combined all the ideas together from our brainstorms and sketched out the paper prototype before we moved to wireframes.
Accessibility
When designing the wireframes I kept the universal design principles in mind, making sure simple and intuitive use, as well as spacing and size, were adhered to properly.
Wireframes
We got our initial wireframes built and did some internal testing to make improvements along the way until we got to where it was in a state to have usability tests done.
Home Screen
Menu Screen
Checkout Screen
Schedule Screen
Heuristic Evaluation
We evaluated our design with Jakob Nielsen's 10 Usability Heuristics.
We ended up changing the default check-out setting from ‘ASAP’ to ‘Schedule’ for error prevention. This way if someone hit the 'Pay Now' button on accident their drink wouldn't automatically be set for the soonest time.
To add more visual feedback we put the drink order status on the home screen after the order status. We also put a ‘success’ screen once the order is complete.
Usability Test
We conducted 4 moderated usability tests using Maze.
Tasks
Take Aways
We found that 75% of participants instinctively used the search bar to find bars near them. To satisfy this search method, we added a near me selection at the top of the drop-down menu that leads to a list of places in order of closest to farthest.
50% of the participants, after successfully completing the first checkout task, expressed being concerned about not knowing where to go once their drink was ready.
Before
After
Overall the success rates were very high and 100% of participants expressed the ease of use throughout the entire platform of the app.
