Context
For a long time up, our mental model of cafes has been that quick stop for coffee before work or school. Now, cafes are creating an experience that makes you want to stay longer.
Students are now coming to find productivity in these beautiful spaces, study with friends, and check out that cafe they saw on social media.
Problem
Students need to know whether they'll have outlets, viable table space, and a sense of equilibrium with all the stimuli around them. Platforms like Yelp and Apple Maps focus on food-specific amenities and directional logistics.
Insights
While I affinity mapped responses from 42 UCSD students, I found that an anxiety persists up until they arrive at the cafe to scope out the environment.
Design Decisions
To help build confidence in choosing and traveling to a cafe, we created an experience that limits the amount of guessing students were previously doing with their next cafe.
Each cafe previews amenities available, crowd flow, and friends who've visited for pre-arrival confidence. For students who already have an idea of what they want, an advanced filter or search can be applied.
Clicking on a cafe, amenities are surfaced first while crowd flow visualizations and social credibility provide supporting confidence for a decision.
Students can log their experience through hefty paragraphs or aesthetic pictures to reference later. It's short and interactive and contains many optional fields to reduce friction.
Lights, culture, and design produce ambience in cafes. This moodboard of color gradients, photos, and keywords that best describe a cafe's vibe based on survey feedback allows users to step into a place without yet being there.
81% of surveyed students find cafe recommendations through friends. The cafe survey, mentioned previously, not only allows students to log information for themselves, but to also share their review with friends.
Reflection
Iteration builds value
Designs become much more full of color and purpose when they're given feedback from real users, making it truly useful and intuitive.
Great teams are built on trust
My team and I experienced a level of synergy, attributed to our supportive communication around ideas, progress, and bandwidth.