An application that designed to remove the barriers preventing customer’s from buying beverages and increase customers' engagement based on pain points.
1828 WLJ Tea Shop uses a Chinese popular herbal tea, Wang Lao Ji (WLJ), in creating new beverages. The brand is creative and has seven branches in Taiwan.
I am the sole UX designer on the software team who is responsible for user research, UX/UI design, and some front-end development. We have a graphic design team who is responsible for branding, etc.
User Research
UX/UI Design
2018/5 - 2019/1
(full-time)
Part I
1828 WLJ Tea Shop is a new brand with a single branch and is currently expanding to seven different branches throughout Taiwan. Our shop has spent a lot of money on marketing events and promoting the brand. However, it is not easy for us to retain existing customers and appeal to new customers without promotions.
According to the data from our POS system, 77.2% of our customers are first-time customers and 22.8% are returning customers who have visited our twice or more. We categorize our customer personas according to their frequency of visits.
In the experience journey map, we place more focus on the first-time customer experience and analyze how we can best solve their pain points.
I used an online questionnaire to evaluate customers' experiences when purchasing drinks at the tea shop in
Taiwan and their expectations of a tea shop application. I obtained over 150 responses in five days from
a popular Taiwanese forum.
Based on the customer personas, user journey map, and questionnaire responses, we concluded that there are three major pain points.
We have come out some ideas to solve the pain points.
I proposed the new user flows and learned that it is important to make customers love the beverage's flavor and download the application to be our member. These two factors form a positive cycle. Moreover, when there is a long queue, ordering online is a definitely must-to-have feature.
Our signature drink is Wang Lao-Ji, a popular herbal tea in China; however, some Taiwanese people do not like the flavor. Our beverage department has tried to launch more new flavors that Taiwanese people are familiar with.
Provide free tasting and invite customers to vote! Since we want the flavor is appealing to potential customers not our loyal customers, it is better to put a board in our shop and hold a tasting event.
Based on our insights, we acknowledge that people regard discounts as the most important thing that a tea shop application should offer. So, we designed four mechanisms that will allow people to obtain lower prices or rewards from the application:
Four membership levels exist to encourage existing tea shop fans to become a return customer.
Customers can receive coupons through marketing events or activities.
Customers can collect points on a loyalty card which can unlock rewards in the future.
New customers should not be forced to download our application. Instead, we should place a sticker on orders that contains a serial number or a QR code that encourages customers to download our application with some benefits such as coupons or points.
To shorten the time spent making a purchase, customers can order beverages and pay through our app. They will receive a number to help them pick up their order. Because many different orders and payment methods can be used, the process of creating this interface required many discussions and testing phases.
Part II
According to the data from our application, over 80% of our customers only open the application when they want to buy beverages.
How might we enhance customers' motivation to buy beverages and use the application?
Look deeper into customers' motivation in our application, we discovered some insights and pain points.
1. Discounts or rewards will definitely drive individuals' motivationOver 70% of Taiwanese people want to get a discounted price for their drinks in a tea shop application. They regard discounts as the most important and attractive thing in the application.
People like to share some cool experiences or beautiful photos on their social media. Not only they satisfies their motivation, but also a promotion for business. However, people often share photos with our beverages in our tea shop but seldom share our application.
People often open an application frequently is because of the lastest news or social updates; however, in our application, since we only have two or three marketing events a month, we seldom update. So, people do not often open our application. Maybe a daily checkout or a long-term game are recommended.
To increase engagement, our marketing team wants to send coupons or valuable prizes to customers through different events with the intent of appealing to them. We must brainstorm some methods to send coupons or valuable prizes to enhance customers motivation.
When customers buy our drinks or use our application, they receive one ticket to use towards a lottery game that offers big prizes. Tickets can be collected for a better chance of winning the prize. I suggested an idea that putting a top ten ranking on the number of tickets customers used below the prizes. Many individuals will be driven by a desire to win and will collect more points.
To increase engagement, we also created an irregular marketing event: when customers open our application and shake their phones, they will receive a coupon for a random discount once per day. This event is available by web view on our iOS and Android application, and I designed and hand-coded it.
Part III
The original version’s UI design did not follow human interface guidelines and had incomplete features, so we redesigned the project from scratch but did not conduct user interviews for the first version. However, testing is needed to discover problems regarding structures or features.
Unfortunately, 1828 WLJ Tea Shop has collapsed because of financial problems. It is such a pity that I cannot see all the plans through to completion or obtain real data to see if the plans work. However, I appreciate the opportunity to stay with this company which has given me a lot of space to both learn and grow.
