Daily Caffeinated
An app to connect and share coffee experiences
Fall 2019
Coffee culture is a combination of flavors, environments, and community. As a self described coffee fanatic, I desired a way to connect with other coffee drinkers and learn about coffee shops and roasters to experience. Currently, there is no platform to share coffee experiences with others. There are also no rewards programs that encourage customers to explore multiple local shops where they reside or while traveling. Daily Caffeinated is a prototype demonstrating an app to address these holes in the market. This project was shaped in a Product Prototyping for Chemical Engineers course.
On This Page
Project Details
Timeline: 1 semester (16 weeks)
Team Size: Solo project
My Role: Creator and Implementer (Mastermind)
Skills Practiced: market research, product viability, competitor analysis, app design, app prototyping
The proposed design for the Daily Caffeinated project was an app to bring together locally owned coffee shops and regular coffee drinkers interested in supporting small businesses.
Inspired Features
Shop Information - reviews, menus, photos, map and location information
Inspired by Google Maps and Yelp - sites with reviews, photos, and essential information about businesses.
Rewards and Achievement Program
Inspired by the Starbucks Rewards program and app for loyal customers.
Mobile and Online Ordering and Payment Options
Inspired by Square's Online Ordering resources for small businesses.
Social Network for sharing shops, drinks, and reviews with friends
Inspired by the Untapped app to discover and share great beers, breweries, and venues with your friends, while earning badges for exploring beers of different styles and countries.
Market Research
Research on current products illuminated a gap in the social network and sharing market. Most reward programs for small businesses revolve around market analytics and point of sale systems. None of the products sought to bring curious people together with new experiences, rather focusing on customer retention or bringing first time visitors back. A few social network style apps for reviews of shops and local coffee culture do exist, but their presence is primarily in their founding locations (namely Australia and the United Kingdom).
The feature map below visualizes this gap in the market. Down along the left are the important features being considered for the Daily Caffeinated app. Red colored features are the most integral, and decreasing in importance for orange and yellow colored. Across the top are a selection of apps, websites, and services that are related to this problem or an adjacent market (such as Untapped, which provides similar features for the beer community). Black boxes indicate which features these products have, while the empty color spaces show where there are gaps in coverage of this particular market. Click on the names of the products to see their websites and learn more about that product.
The large red space at the top of the map adequately shows the lack of services for the boutique coffee industry.
To see even more features researched during this project, take a look at the full feature map.
App Prototyping
Strengthened by the lack of a product in the niche market of coffee, I built a mock app to prototype the experience a user would have and explore how they interacted with it. I used Adobe XD to create a preliminary
Armed with a mock app, initial testing could take place with friends and family I know to be active in the coffee world, whether that be avid consumers, curious learners, or even local shop owners. I also specifically spoke with students I worked with who I know are not afraid to give honest feedback about what they like or dislike about the product.
Some changes suggested in user feedback were in relation to usability, such as increased font size and larger button areas. I also received many comments about the repeated features – which I used to show a concept and keep the app feeling like a work in progress needing improvement. Some other observations I made when test users were exploring the app were the tendency to want to swipe left and right on photos or scroll up and down on a feed for more information. These natural (or trained) motions could be implemented to make navigation simpler and easy to figure out.
