Overview
For my Interaction Design II class, my team of 3 others and I spent 8 weeks working to create a coffee ordering kiosk prototype, Dream Bean Cafe. We designed this kiosk using the tool Figma with the goal and end result of creating a POS system that is flexible and accessible for all users.
Method
My team and I utilized the Lean UX method, which is a fast-paced collaborative and cross functional way of doing UX that focuses on getting immediate feedback on designs which helps us understand if the system meets business objectives. Using FigJam, my team and I worked in two sprints each consisting of three weeks.
Challenges
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Testing without screen share
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Cohesive Design
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Coming up with color scheme
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Everyone having different schedules being students.
Role: UX Designer/Researcher
Duration: Oct. 2022 - Nov. 2022
Introduction
Dream Bean Cafe was the name my team and I came up with for the coffee kiosk idea that our team lead, Andrea, pitched for our Interaction Design II class. We designed a kiosk that enables people to order coffee without having to order in person. As a team we came up with multiple solutions that we though this idea would bring: the less likeliness of orders being messed up, the ability for people who speak a foreign language to customize their order experience, accessibility for people with visual impairments to be able to adjust the font size, and having the ability to customize their orders based on their preferences by listing multiple options. We also came up with the idea to include an option for a rewards program to the kiosk where customers are able to log in with their phone number so that they can keep track of their points, their favorite drinks, and their recent orders.
Lean UX and how we applied it
Lean UX is a fast-paced method of doing a mixture of UX, Lean, and Scrum which focuses on the user's experience with a product. Scrum is a form of project management (Agile) which consists of short meetings that help teams keep track of their progress toward their goals and maintain accountability. Lean UX focuses on the prioritization of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) which are the most riskiest and important features on a product or service. This allowed our team to iterate ideas quickly and minimize any unnecessary work.
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For our project we worked in two sprints, each consisting of three weeks. As a team we made assumptions about our product in Week 0 of each sprint. For weeks 1 and 2 of both sprints we tested out our assumptions by interviewing three participants each week that tested out our product. During our interview weeks we also held three two-day stand-up meetings, each about 15 minutes long, where we discussed our progress, ideas, and what tasks we should be completing. This process page will go into further detail about both sprints.
Sprint 1
Week 0
During this week my team and I worked on our Lean UX canvas, which is a framework that consists of series of exercises that helps teams create conversations for us to understand the scenario of the business and user needs. For our project, we utilized the Lean UX canvas to:
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Make assumptions about business/user needs
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Define a product problem statement
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Discuss possible solutions that will solve our business problem
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Discuss what type of users we should focus on
Lean UX Canvas Broken-down
Business Problem
For our project, my team and I brainstormed ideas of what business problems our project will solve. Discussing business problems helps us focus on what to solve rather than just implementing features so that we are able to achieve customer success as our end goal. We did this by listing each of our ideas and then voting on what ideas for each category we felt were important.
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Product Problem Statement
"The current state of coffee shops has focused primarily on old fashion ordering process.What existing products/services fail to address is the advancement of technology and an extra way to provide a service.Our product/service will address this gap by giving the customer a more flexible and accessible option for ordering.
Our initial focus will be adults and students.We'll know we are successful when we see customer satisfaction, order efficiency and an increase in store orders with the use of the kiosk."
Click image to view Business Problem activity
Business Outcomes
Business outcomes are basically making assumptions on what we think will happen if we solve business problems. We did an outcome-to-impact mapping exercise to measure what outcomes we hope to see with our idea. This exercise consists of impact metrics which is the measure of our end goal we hope to achieve. It also consists of leading and lagging outcome metrics that show how we will reach that end goal.
Click image to view Outcome-to-Impact activity
Users
The next part of the Lean UX canvas focuses on what kind of users do we want to buy/use our product. We created proto-personas, which are personas based off of assumptions of who we see using our product. Then, as we further our research, we adjust our personas accordingly based on who closely our assumptions come true. For this project, we created a primary persona of a 21 year old college student and a secondary persona of a 41 year old person who might have a language barrier and visual impairment.
User Outcomes & Benefits
After we created our proto-personas, we had a discussion of what would drive our proto-persona to look for our product. The goal for this exercise is to focus on what outcomes we want when a user uses our product:
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What is the user trying to accomplish?
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Order coffee/items​
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How does the user want to feel duding and after the process?
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Certain and satisfied ​
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How does our product or service get the user close to a goal(s)?
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By giving them reassurance​
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Why would your user seek our your product?
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Gives them time to explore options​
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Reduces wait time
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Visual representations of options
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Accessible
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What behavior change can we observe that tells they've achieved their goal(s)?
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Observe what kind of users use the kiosk the most​
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No confusion
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Solutions
My team and I used an affinity map where we listed to our own solutions on how we can solve our business problem and ensure customer satisfaction. Then together we discussed and grouped our similar ideas which helped us understand what feature we want to create
Click image to view Affinity Map
Hypothesis Table
My team and I combined all of our assumptions into unified statements: “We believe that [business outcome] will be achieved if [user] attains [benefit] with [feature].” Each of these statements focuses on one feature.
Hypothesis Prioritization Canvas
Next, using the Hypothesis Prioritization Canvas, as a team we discussed what we sought to be the most important and riskiest features to test.
Click image to view Hypothesis Prioritization Canvas
Click image to view Hypothesis Table
Hypothesis Table - Ordered by Risk
Hypothesis Table - Ordered by Risk
Next we ordered each of our hypothesis from the most riskiest to the least riskiest. The goal of this is understand what is the most important thing we want to learn. In the red portion we wrote what makes each hypothesis risky.
Click image to view Hypothesis Table
Hypothesis Table - MVP
This exercise helps us understand what is the least amount of work we need to do to learn the next most important thing. For this table, in the red we wrote in short what feature will make our hypothesis come true.
Click image to view Hypothesis Table
Product/Sprint Backlog
After completing the Lean UX Canvas, we prepared for weeks 1 & 2 by creating a product backlog, which is basically our hypothesis table. We also created a sprint 1 backlog, which is where we decided what we will design and create to test out.
Week 1
2-Day Stand-ups
Week 1 of sprint 1 is where we had held three 2-day Stand-up meetings, which are basically 15 minute long where we discussed our progress, ideas, and what we should be completing during this week. During our meetings for this week, we worked on creating a script for our interviews/usability tests that we plan on doing within the same week, discussed what we learned from our interviews, and what about our prototype we should be changing based on our feedback.
Interviews/Usability Testing
During this week, we interviewed and tested three participants; Daniel, Denise, and Camryn. We chose our participants based on who closely aligned with our proto-personas. When creating our script, we wanted to ask questions to help us learn how drinking coffee affects their schedule and their experiences with using kiosks. As for our prototype that we were testing this week, we each made low-fidelity screens of the log-in page, filter screen page, favorites page, and zoom settings.
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For our first week of testing, our team member, Nigel, traveled to the participants and they performed the test on his iPad while we listened in through Discord. This was difficult because we weren't able to watch their thinking process when going through our prototype.
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After each interview, we worked as a team on Affinity Maps, which is a way where we each list out what important takeaways we got from the interviews and then group them based on similarities to find common patterns. One of the main usability issues we received feedback on was on how scrolling is difficult and sometimes it's hard to tell when a page is scrollable or not. We kept this in mind when making changes to our prototype.
2-Day Stand-ups
Interview with Daniel
Click image to view one of our Affinity Maps
Week 2
After week 1, we edited our prototype more based on the feed back we received from our interviewees. We also added more to our interview script to gain more insight on kiosk and coffee ordering related issues. During this week we interviewed two of the same participants from the previous week, Denise and Camryn. We also interviewed a new person, Logan. We created two different scripts, one for returning participants and one for new participants.
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This time we decided to do our usability test different by asking our participants I share their screens while going through all of the tasks. We found this way to be much better since we were able to watch their thinking process and how they re interacting with our prototype.
Interview with Logan
After each interview, we did affinity mapping again and had three 2-Day Stand-up meetings for the same week. By the end of the week, my team and I completed a Sprint Retrospective, which is where we looked back on how things went during sprint 1 and had a discussion on what went well, what could have gone better, and things we should try next. We all agreed that we did a great job of completing our interviews on time and we received great feedback which helped us revise our prototype better. What we thought could have gone better was asking more interview questions for research so we can learn more about the user's needs. What we wanted to try next for sprint 2, was to create the screens to be more cohesive and allow the participants to explore our kiosk screens more after completing the usability test.
Sprint 2
Week 0
Business Problem
Week 0 of sprint 2 was copying our Lean UX canvas and making changes to our assumptions based on our evidence. This week helped my team and I start discussion of what we see to be working for our participants and what isn't working that we should remove.
We went back to our original business problem and added grey sticky notes with different ideas. Then we used dots to have a voting on what ideas we each felt were the most important to consider for each category.
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Click to view Business Problem
Then after voting, we went back and revised our product problem statement:
"The current state of coffee shops has focused primarily on in person ordering process.
What existing products/services fail to address is simplicity and avoiding cognitive overload.
Our product/service will address this gap by having limited options and features so its not complicated.
Our initial focus will be people who don't want to feel rushed and be able to customize their order.
We'll know we are successful when we see customer satisfaction, order effeciency and an increase in store orders with the use of the kiosk."
Business Outcomes
We added more metrics to our Outcome-to-Impact activity based on what we learned from our interviews from sprint 1, which was our participants like to have to option to add special instructions to their orders and would like to see what they previously ordered.
Click to view Outcome-to-Impact Activity
Users
We added that our primary persona, Zoe, likes to save money using rewards, and our secondary persona, Angela, orders coffee 2-3 times week. We didn't't need to change our persona much, just add those things based on what we learned from our interviews.
User Outcomes & Benefits/ Solutions
We kept the same for sprint 2 as it was in sprint 1 for these two sections of the Lean UX canvas.
Hypothesis -- Ordered by Risk/ MVPs & Experiments
During our interviews, someone made a suggestion to create an option to add gift cards. We decided to add this feedback to our hypothesis table and on the 'Test' part of our Hypothesis Prioritization Canvas. For our hypothesis MVPs and Experiments table we added this option to the bottom and decided to implement this feature in the navigation of our prototype to test.
Click to view Hypothesis Table
Week 1
2-Day Stand-up
Just like sprint 1, we held three 2-Day stand-up meetings during this week to track our progress and communicate with each other on what we should be getting done. We also used these meetings to start discussing color styles, font styles, and the overall framework that we want to use so that the screen could be more cohesive.
Click to view 2-Day Stand-up
Interviews/Usability Testing
During this sprint, our interviews went much. better compared to our interviews from sprint 1. We had more questions which gave us more insight for new participants who were interviewing with us. We also kept up with having the participants share their screens while doing the usability test so that we could watch them perform each task. After each interview we completed affinity maps again and grouped our notes to identify common patterns.
Some of the changes that we made from sprint 1's usability test was creating a filter screen that required minimal scrolling. We added a gift card screen where users are able to send a gift card, edit their desired amount, and add a special note. We also created a checkout screen where we wanted to test out a way for the user to be able to add their reward before checking out. My team and I wanted to test these features out because they were all designed after receiving feedback from our previous interviews.
Checkout Screen
Gift Card Screen
Filer Screen
Week 2
By this week of our second sprint, we had made our prototype more high-fidelity. The participants that we kept the same were very impressed with how many changes we had made compared to the very first week of testing in sprint 1. They appreciated us for taking their feedback into consideration. In order to test out all of the features to rule out everything in the Hypothesis Table of MVPs and Experiments, we let our participants go through our prototype freely and give us feedback as they go through each flow. Watching their thinking process from the start of the flow to the end helped us take note of minor details we may have missed.
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Week 2 of sprint 2 remained the same with three 2-Day stand-up meetings and three usability tests. By the end of the week we completed another sprint retrospective to reflect back on sprint 2 for what went well, what could have gone better, and what we should be doing next. We agreed that having the participants share their screens this time around worked out better since we were able to watch their thinking process. We also agreed on how much change we brought into our design during this sprint based on feedback compared to sprint 1. Some things we could have done better were more involved with the prototype. We wanted to make more interactive features and test out more screens.
Sprint Retrospective
Conclusion
Using the Lean UX to create a product this semester was definitely a challenge and much more fast paced compared to previous projects I have worked on. With this project I found myself constantly having to iterate and come up with multiple ideas. Some of the challenges I had were during sprint 1, week 0, working on the Lean UX canvas. All of the concepts and exercises were just introduced to me this semester so having to quickly come up with assumptions and what to test with my team was hard but I also feel that it helped spark more creativity and taught me how to constantly keep brainstorming.
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If given the chance to re-do this project, I would take more time to prepare my interviews with more structure but adding more questions and tasks so that I am able to get the most research possible in such a short period of time. Though this wasn't a huge issue, I definitely think my team and I could have utilized our time even more during sprint 1 by acquiring more information.
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Overall, this project was interesting and exciting. Though in the moment it may have seemed confusing since it is a much more fast paced version of doing user experience, I feel that it has sparked more creativity in me and has taught me how to work cross functionally in a short period of time.