Expect more than coffee

Every coffee shop focuses on the perfect latte. Starbucks is focused on human connection. I had the ambitious goal to design a new feature for the Starbucks mobile app to drive more revenue to the company.
After this exercise, the user can now say goodbye to odd timing, waiting in lines and even forgetting their favourite beverage/snack. The user can now enjoy what Starbucks has to offer besides coffee – Human Connection

Driving more revenue

Starbucks needed a new feature for its mobile app to drive more revenue to the company and serve a gap common to its customers. That feature had to comply with the company’s vision.
We had 3 weeks to come up with an iteration.

Understanding the users and the market

Starbucks strong branding and UI style guide allowed us to allocate more effort and time into research.
We focused on three points during the research phase:

Feature Comparison: Understand what Starbucks is doing to differentiate its brand from its competitors.
User Analysis: Surveyed and interviewed Starbucks users to learn what drove them to download the Starbucks app and what kept them using it.
Competitor Analysis: Surveyed Starbucks competitor users to understand why they prefer the competitors over Starbucks.

Apart from that we also spent some time at our local Starbucks observing the users’ behaviour when picking up orders previously ordered by mobile app. This highly influenced our user personas.

What is the differentiator?

The product offering doesn't differ much from the competitors.
What differentiates Starbucks from other brands is the in-store experience and the quality and presentation of their products – there's a search for a warm and personalized human experience and the store design is simple.
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The app follows that experience by giving the user a customized and warm experience and presenting its products following a clean design and aesthetics.

Finding gaps in a great experience

Online survey targeting coffee ordering apps users.

We sent out a survey where we gathered information about users’ behaviours regarding the Starbucks app.
We concluded that: 40% of the users made use of the app every week; 50% of the users were highly satisfied with the app and products.

Interviews conducted with selected survey respondents.

We then interviewed the users that were regular users of one or more coffee ordering apps.
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Users downloaded the app because of the rewards program - it allows them to get free modifications and/or free coffee.
Timing and order status were the users’ main concerns.
[The app provides the user with an estimated time bracket for when the order would be ready for pickup but the timing was sometimes off].

Research insights

Based on our research we set up two personas:
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‍The Piggybacker – a regular user that would take their coworkers' orders along with their order.
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‍The Early Bird – a user that ordered the same thing every morning.
The survey and interview results suggested that there was a need for a pre-ordering feature.

MVP

We tested the new feature with selected users and found that 75% of the users were interested in using the feature.
When we asked how much such a service should cost, the opinions differed:

35% of users didn’t want to pay for the service
25% suggested a $5/month subscription
40% suggested that the feature should be included with a minimum of purchases per week.

This last suggestion could solve the problem for all the stakeholders since the users would have the feature without an extra payment and Starbucks would benefit from this feature since it would get orders for a minimum of 1 week.*

*To use this feature for free, users would have to place an order for a minimum of 1 week (5 days in a row).

Results & Learnings

With the pre-scheduling feature, the user can now say goodbye to odd timing, waiting in lines and even forgetting their favourite beverage/snack. The user can now enjoy what Starbucks has to offer besides coffee – Human Connection.
As for next steps, we would like to release the MVP and gather more data on the experience from customers and staff members that need to use this functionality.

Sometimes, if you pay close attention to the users, they'll openly tell you the solution to your problem.