Dream & Beans End to End App Design/Branding

Project Summary: An end-to-end mobile application to compliment a prospective local sleep cafe, a place where patrons can order food and drink as well as reserve short-term rooms for on-the-go resting.

Category: Mobile Design

Collaborators: Hailey Lemon

Dates: Dec 2021 - Feb 2022

My Role: UX Design, UI Design, Branding, Logo Design

Project Overview

Coffee shops are plentiful, helping to fuel productivity in busy individuals. However, there’s little that encourages us to slow down and take time for ourselves. Dream & Beans is a cafe that offers all your favorite cafe consumables plus short-term single-room rentals. This project’s purpose is to build a mobile app to support the cafe as well as branding and logo design.

Problem Statement

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Waiting in long lines and gambling on a room being available doesn’t aid in a busy individual’s accessibility to self-care. The mobile application needs to amplify the business’s rest and refuel attitude by making all cafe tasks streamlined while still providing a self-indulgent feel.

The Design Process

To solve this problem, I used the Design Thinking Process:

❤️ Empathize ✅ Define 💡Ideate ✏️ Design 📊 Test

Empathize Phase

During the empathize phase, the following research goals were established:

Determine demographic
Determine what users need to confidently use the app
Conduct a competitive analysis
Determine stakeholder requirements
Learn more about self-care, resting, and cafe-use habits of users

Secondary Market Research

Prior to any other type of research, I wanted to better familiarize myself with the topics at hand. Through this initial research, I learned:

❤️‍🩹

People working 55 or more hours each week are at a 35% increased risk for stroke and 17% higher risk of heart disease

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Even in well-rested individuals, daytime naps can improve performance in areas such as reaction time, logical reasoning, and symbol recognition. Additionally, it can boost one's mood. (Journal of Sleep Research)

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A self-care routine has been proven to reduce or eliminate anxiety and depression, reduce stress, increase happiness, and more. In a national survey, participants reported that self-care provided: enhanced self-confidence (64%), increased productivity (67%), happiness (71%).

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Ben & Jerry's, Zappos, Uber, and Google have installed dedicated nap spaces in their headquarters.

Competitive Analysis

User interviews, stakeholder meetings, and my own research helped established some competitors worthy of analysis. Still, there was a disconnect in the importance of making relaxation accessible within the competition.

Surveys & User Interviews

My surveys and interviews not only helped me gauge demographical interest in the app and the business itself but also unveiled some useful insights.

Key Takeaways

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Users reported desiring rest at least once during their workday, but some reported feeling tired every few hours.

☕

Coffee shops are far more than just energy refills for many people. They are:

social
a treat
relaxing
a study/work aid
aromatherapy

“I’ll go get something to drink to pick me up, it’s my little ounce of serotonin.”

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Users both mentioned eating healthy & treating themselves as forms of self-care.

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The majority of users would nap during their workday if they were allowed and if there was somewhere to do so.

Other Important Considerations

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Users reported requiring self-care at least once a day!

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Users who are too busy to rest push through feeling tired, sometimes aided by caffeine but otherwise try to ignore the feeling.

Stress is complex for users. When not taken care of, it gets worse, which continues in one big vicious cycle. Therefore, many users mentioned the need for continuous attention to their self-care.

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Self-care matures, and younger participants reported needing it less.

Define

During the define stage, I used my research to determine demographic and formulate a persona.

Ideate

Moving on from research and defining my audience, I began ideating. I knew this stage would be intense since I was also tasked with branding and logo design. I got right to it, starting with the task flow and user flow.

Task Flow

User Flow

Logo & Branding

After mood boarding, I dove into brand identity planning and logo sketching. Conveying both coffee and sleep proved difficult, so I relied on a mixture of calming and energizing colors. As for the logo, I played around with several different directions.

⬇️ The chosen logo represents a drink droplet with both coffee and nighttime. The wave represents the movement of a busy individual’s life as well as the joining, much like a puzzle piece, of sleep and coffee. The logo features minimal detail to best suit the cafe’s modern and clean feel.

Sketching

During the sketching phase, I knew the tasks needed to be simple, quick, reliable, and familiar. Busy people don’t want to learn new things. Therefore, many of the screens take inspiration from competitors that users were well-acquainted with.

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In order to make tasks easy, I knew there needed to be several ways to accomplish the main tasks. Therefore, an icon bar and cards with CTA shortcuts were used.

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Communication with the user was also another way I chose to make tasks easy. Therefore, at this stage, I knew I wanted to implement feedback in anything users interacted with.

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Designing for familiarity also meant making different tasks within the app work relatively the same way. For example, I designed menu ordering and room booking to be nearly identical.

Design Phase

Mid-Fidelity Wireframes

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One significant problem I had yet to address was the issue of cyclical stress and the daily need for self-care for most people. So, during mid-fidelity development, I decided to add a reward system feature to encourage more use of the cafe services and incentivize taking time for yourself.

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Other additions during this phase included designing a way to cancel orders.

The Final Product

After building the initial prototype, I conducted moderated user tests. Changes from my feedback included providing more info about the business, a way to use rewards during the ordering process, increase in constrast for visually-impaired users, labeling buttons, and designing a way to opt out of emails during the sign up process.

Below is the finalized prototype. Enjoy!

Reflections & Future Plans

✅

Collaborating with a stakeholder. This was my first project working with a stakeholder, which taught me a lot about how to advocate for the user within the design as well as please the business owner.

💕

I love designing for well-being. This is not the first project I have done that incorporates health and wellness, but it did teach me that I really like working in this space!

☝

In the future… I have plans to continuously update the design as the business changes and grows. With more time and materials, such as business photos provided by the stakeholder, I will be able to design a more tailored experience.

Animation Source