Brewed For You | Nicholos Palmer

Brewed For You: Designing a Custom Tea and Delivery Experience

I am designing a mobile application to address a common challenge faced by tea enthusiasts in urban areas: the ability to create personalized tea blends from a diverse selection of ingredients. While many retail stores and tea houses provide herbal tea options, few offer the opportunity for customers to customize their blends using an extensive range of high-quality ingredients. This app aims to fill that gap by empowering tea drinkers with a convenient and customizable experience.

Product

Mobile App

Skills

User Interviews
Persona Building
Empathy Mapping
Information Architecture
User Task

PROBLEM

A gap in the market for customizable herbal tea delivery services. While customers can order tea from mainstream tea shops and have it delivered through popular food delivery services, those who wish to create their own made-to-order tea blends, using a wide variety of ingredients, have very few options.

Going to the coffee shop or grocery store just to get a generic tea blend can be time-consuming.

RESEARCH & DISCOVERY

For the initial interviews, I gave participants the opportunity to elaborate on their interests in herbal tea blends, and to speak on both their pain points and likes when it comes to personalizing their own tea blends. I started with 4 interviewees to understand their use cases and struggles.

Common Challenges

Lack of wide selections: All participants opined on the face that there were insufficient establishments (both physical and online) that offered a customization experience to building their own tea blends. One participant mentioned that to mix orange rinds with other ingredients would be costly as he would need to buy each ingredient in bulk to make a few cups of tea.

Exploring new blends and building them from scratch can be challenging if there are now pre-designed templates or guided customization.
Sourcing information and in-depth explanations of many herbal tea benefits are still lacking. Functional descriptions can be brief especially on packaging.
While exploring coffee shops and tea houses can be fun, there are times when just getting well made, quality brewed tea is time consuming and inconvenient.

Sample Persona

SOLUTIONS

Having highlighted the commonalities in pain points across participants, a proposed solution is to build a mobile app that facilitates tea blending for avid users and customers for a potential uptake by tea shops or other tea serving establishment.

Such an app could be designed to:

Enable customization and personalization: Allow remote customers to create made-to-order tea blends from an extensive selection of ingredients, tailored to their preferences.
Provide pre-designed templates: Offer a rich library of customization templates, hosted in a single digital space, accessible to both beginners and tea enthusiasts.
Incorporate a delivery service: Include a delivery option for brewed herbal tea, with its logistics undergoing dedicated service design processes to ensure efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Connect customers to local sources: Serve as a resource for identifying unique tea blends available at physical locations within a customer’s geographic area.

WIREFRAMES

Below are initial lo-fidelity and hi-fidelity wireframes that highlight main screens ( splash page, login/sign up, delivery address info, first homescreen idea, check out and customize)

This splash screen wireframe details the potential company logo with the tagline underneath. I pondered on the possibility of including Login UI on the screen, as depicted.

This screen depicts Login/Sign up UI.

During in secondary research, I learned that when creating delivery services it is best to gather the users' address during the Sign up process. This assists with streamlined onboarding and identifying which outlets, restaurants, etc are located near the user. Additionally, it is important to offer an off ramp or an option for users who do not want to share their delivery info at this point of the journey.

This wireframe depicts the potential checkout screen with two items listed in the cart and a slide of recommended products above the "quantity" and "Check out" buttons