UX & Service Designer
Case study.
Setting foundations for future growth
company. Allpress
timeframe. August - September 2019
category. discovery
team. 1-2 designers
Project background
Allpress Espresso was established in 1989 by Micheal Allpress who brought his passion for coffee back from Seattle to New Zealand. Starting his journey in Auckland, now the company work with over 1000 independent cafes around the world. Moreover, the company manage e-commerce stores in 5 different countries: New Zealand, Australia, United Kingdom, Singapore and Japan.
Project objectives
Allpress is experiencing strong growth and global expansion as a brand. With the steady increase for coffee supply distribution, the team recognised that their current online channel was underdeveloped, difficult to manage and would not support them through the time of growth. That was the moment when Allpress contacted Pixel Fusion with a need to find a solution. Before we jumped into designing a new e-commerce solution, we wanted to focus and understand the customer, available data and technical requirements.
Process
The discovery process was designed in a way to uncover important insights and build a clear picture of the overall project strategy. It included:
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Company vision and history.
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Market challenges and competitors arena.
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Customers and their buying behaviours.
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Current data around sales, team and customers.
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Technical constraints and requirements.
1. Understanding the company history, values and vision.
The research and development team was invited on a tour to a local roastery, where Allpress team presented the 30 years of company history. Understanding the existing processes in the company was an important part of creating empathy to uncover challenges Allpress was facing. Ability to observe and talk to the team members during the visit was a great chance to confirm the strong brand values and identity that we were able to read about in the market research provided by Kantar.
2. Understanding the market challenges and competitors arena.
To gain a better understanding of the coffee industry, we conducted a competitor analysis where we focused on Allpress direct and indirect competitors. The research allowed us to spot patterns and opportunities for the project going forward. Even though Allpress is a brand with different values than the big coffee companies (e.g. Starbucks) we still included them in our research to get strategy overview of the big market players.
Part of the competitor analysis report.
3. Understanding the customers and their buying behaviours.
To kick off the discovery phase, we undertook customer research to help us build empathy with Allpress customers and to understand their coffee-buying behaviour, habits and needs. The insights from this research formed the basis of the customer journey mapping exercise and gave us important direction for the e-commerce store user experience.
Our initial plan was to conduct a full day of 'guerilla research' (otherwise knows as intercept interviews) where we approached potential coffee buyers in an appropriate environment and asked a series of questions. The location we selected was Britomart in Auckland CBD, during the morning hours. We hoped we would be able to gather valuable insights from the people working in the nearby offices. However, after the first hour of the interviews, we realised that the majority of the participants we spoke to did not fit the Allpress target market. They enjoyed a good cup of coffee made in a local cafe but at home, they largely drank instant coffee.
We decided to cut the interviews short and changed our approach. Instead, we quickly scheduled seven 30-minutes interviews with participants that we pre-vetted. The results of this study were far more insightful.
Guerilla research at Britomart (0:13 - 0:27)
Following the customer interviews, we conducted an affinity mapping exercise, which was designed to identify key themes and insights. The output of this activity helped us identify 3 key insights, as well as customers behavioural model.
Behavioural Model and Behavioural Personas
On 27 August we ran a 1-day customer journey mapping workshop with Allpress. The goal of the workshop was to gain an end-to-end understanding of the current coffee-buying experience for potential Allpress customers.
Casting our focus wider, and understanding all the many ways that customers purchase coffee (including in the supermarket, at cafes and online) allowed us to think divergently and identify pain points in other channels that we could potentially address through the online store. This gave us a wide range of insights and ideas that would go beyond a standard online store, and allow us to differentiate the Allpress experience.
By the end of the workshop, we created a detailed customer journey map, as well as a long list of opportunities, and some initial concepts of solutions.
Customer Journey Mapping workshop
5. Understanding the current data and business goals
Analysing the data from the current websites and sales in every country we were able to spot common behaviours and future opportunities. Individual chats with team members gave us additional insights into internal processes and struggles. Those needed to be taken into consideration as growing on-line sells would unquestionably mean increasing manual work for the employees.
Uncovering the current data gave us a clear starting point to measure against all our future actions. However, to make informed decisions around the project approach and features prioritisation, we needed to understand where Allpress wants to be and identify a number of key business goals.
We achieved this through the Goals-Signals-Metrics workshop. We mapped identified goals with signals - observable customer behaviours that we could measure in order to track our performance. The final output was a list of metrics which we would include as part of the acceptance criteria for each story in the backlog. This ensured that we were implementing metrics with every story, enabling us to measure whether we were on track for achieving business goals.
Goals - Signals - Metrics worskhop.
6. Understanding technical constraints and requirements.
The technical discovery was crucial to uncovering the current technology constraints and requirements to prepare Allpress for future growth. E-commerce solution which will be scalable but also simple to use become our primary goal. The original solution was clunky and didn't have a centralised media database and design system. As a consequence, online stores and customer experience varied from country to country.
Key Insights
Convenience is a key influence on buying behaviour
Almost every research participant expressed some version of “I never let myself run out of coffee.” Most people appear to be motivated by this urgency and thus take the easy option - purchasing coffee from the supermarket.
Most people are habitual when it comes to coffee
Majority of research participants expressed being 'set in their ways' when it comes to coffee - they buy the same coffee (or have one or two favourite brands) they know they like.
Allpress needs to cater to a wide range of coffee drinkers
From utilitarian coffee drinkers, to passionate enthusiasts - the consumer market is highly diverse. In order to maximise online sales, Allpress should design an experience that caters to the needs of both extremes.
Recommendations
Based on the key insights we discovered we were able to provide Allpress with a list of recommendations:
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In order to compete with supermarkets, Allpress needs to provide a frictionless coffee buying experience that replicates the easy of simply picking up coffee from the store.
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Implement a coffee subscription features which directly addresses the convenience requirement and the need to always have a coffee at home.
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Implement possibilities to stop or skip the subscription as some customers were wary of scheduled payment due to irregular income.
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Provide consumers with multiple delivery options, including and expanding on 'click and collect' option.
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People’s willingness to experiment with new coffees seem to be related to their knowledge of coffee and confidence in understanding and articulating the flavours they like. By providing easy educational content to help customers understand their coffee tastes, Allpress can increase their confidence and encourage them to try Allpress coffee.
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Consumers are risk-averse when it comes to trying new coffee. They see new coffees as a gamble, where they may end up wasting money on a coffee they don’t like. Providing a low-risk, low-cost way to try Allpress coffee
(e.g. coffee tastings, samples, “money-back guarantee”) would reduce this fear and encourage people to try Allpress. -
When creating online content, consider the use of progressive disclosure which means the consumer is in control of the amount of information they want to engage with.
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When considering features such as subscriptions, ensure that the options available cater to diverse needs. For example, having a simple refill subscription will suit more utilitarian customers, while having an“explorer” subscription will suit the more experimental enthusiast.
Summary
The Allpress discovery was a hands-on project which gave us a lot of valuable insights. During those two weeks of exploration time, we took a wide approach to understand multiple customers scenarios and their journeys. We extracted numerous touchpoints from customers but also from the technical and Allpress employee perspective. This approach uncovered a list of recommendations that set the direction for the future phases of the project.
Understanding company position and setting future goals with matched metrics allowed us to make sure we will be able to measure the desired behaviours and act if needed.
My key learning point from this discovery was that we missed one important step - we should have included a usability testing of the original e-commerce solution. It would allow us to present evidence on elements that customers enjoyed or struggled with. Based on this we could have made well-informed decisions about the next steps. It would also allow us to measure the difference between the old and new solution.
