Puku Puku Coffee Roasters Website
Introduction
Client: Puku Puku Coffee Roasters
Location: Lima, Peru
My involvement: I was the research lead of a team of 4 researchers.
Problem space
Puku Puku wanted to expand its business by opening a specialty coffee roastery.
Business objective was to build a website to:
1. Sell specialty coffee
2. Promote Puku Puku as a pioneer in specialty coffee in Lima
3. Promote Puku Puku’s coffee shops
Our task was to conduct user research to identify user needs and provide product team with necessary information to build the website.
Stakeholder Interviews
We started the project with stakeholder interviews.
The two underlying questions we wanted to answer were:
1. What are they hoping to achieve?
2. How does success look like to them?
Some of the question we asked in our interviews were:
What is the business about and how does it make money?
Who are it’s customers?
What is the competitive landscape?
Who is the target audience for this website? How does it help customers achieve their objectives?
What are your competitors doing well that you would like to emulate?
What do you think could be your competitive advantage in the online space?
How do you differentiate yourself in comparison to your competitors?
How would you define success for the website? Would you be able to define specific goals or targets?
What is the biggest risk to the future success of the website? What are the biggest challenges you face in the online space?
What worries do you have in relation to this project?
What are the common use cases for the product?
What user research have you already done that might be relevant for this project?Other sources of information?
Is there anyone else we need to talk to?
Stakeholder brief
It was important to to see if we are on the same page with stakeholders regarding business scope, goals and timeline of the project so:
We wrote a summary of what we heard
Called out any contradictions for discussion
We got it signed off after resolving contradictions
Our Approach
We used a conceptual framework called " The Five Planes" from James Garret’s book " The elements of user experience" to tackle the project.
Why we used the frame work?
First, this framework could allow us to breakdown the project into distinctive components, so we could manage the whole project more effectively.
Second, the company did not have a clear idea about how they want to compete in specialty coffee market. So next to user research we needed to help them to create a strategy. And late according to companies strategy, objectives and user needs, in the next plane we could decide about functional and content requirements.
A Strategy is a plan to create value. So our task was to select an integrative set of choices that could position Puku Puku in specialty coffee market in a way that they could win.
In order to accomplish that we had to answer two questions:
1. Why they should be on this playing field (Specialty coffee), and not the other one. ( Commodity coffee)
2. How on that field (specialty coffee) they could be better than any body else at serving the customers.
Research question
Our underlying research question was:
How people are achieving their goal of purchasing coffee right now?
Why we chose this question? Because it could help us understand what are our customers needs, how they are solving their problem and what are the opportunities for us to explore.
In order to answer our underlying question we had to answer some high-level questions:
What are our user’s needs/goals/motivations?
What are their pain points?
What are their behavior?
What are their context of use?
What are their mental models?
Before deciding on the research methods, we wanted to now which type of questions we need to ask in order to answer our high level questions:
So for creating those questions we had a specific approach. I asked the research team to imagine an all-knowing user who can answer any question we have correctly. So every research wrote as many questions as she could in order to answer the high-level questions:
Then we sorted the questions and prioritize them according to importance.
Here you can see a sample of the questions that we formulated:
It is essential to mention that these are not the questions that we actually asked participants in our research. The reason that we used this approach was to think about all the question that could help us define areas that we needed to investigate in our research without limiting ourself with formulating correct questions. Most of these questions we later reformulated so we can use them in our interviews and contextual inquiries. We needed also create subquestions on order to answer many of them.
Research methods
UX research fundamentally answers two questions:
1. Who are our users and what are they trying to do?
2. Can they use the thing we have design for them to solve their problems?
With the previous questions that we had formulated in mind, we answered the first questions with a filed visit coupled with interviews, two interviews with experts and a contextual inquiry.
For answering the second question, of course we did not have yet a website, so we decided to conduct a competitor analysis, which included heuristic evaluations and usability tests of our competitors. Later in the project when our prototypes were ready we conducted couple of rounds of usability tests and finally after the website was built we conducted another round of usability test.
Research repository
Before we start to conduct our research we created a research repository in dovetail and Miro.
We used dovetail for storing, synthesizing and analyzing our data and on Miro we created a UX wall which is basically a board that included a summary of our research data, research artifacts and digestible reports in an accessible format for our stakeholders.
Secondary research
We conducted extensive secondary research to increase our domain knowledge about specialty coffee and third wave coffee movement. Two important sources of information for us were Specialty Coffee Association of America and Perfect Daily Grind a major digital coffee publication.
Field visits and interviews
Because we were at the start of the research process, a generative research method like field visit and user interviews could help us generate new insights about our customers.
We visited two Puku Puku coffee shops and two competitors, Tostaduría Bisetti and Neira Coffee Lab.
In our field visits we were interested in:
How people purchase coffee beans?
What are their criteria for choosing a bag of coffee?
What questions they ask before purchasing coffee?
How do they compare different coffees?
During our field visits we also asked some customers to sit with us to have an interview. In our interviews we wanted to know more about their needs and their pain points while buying coffee online and in-store.
Heuristic evaluation and competitors usability test
We did heuristic evaluation and competitors analysis of our competitors and two of best-in-class specialty coffee roasters in the world, Barn Coffee Roasters based in Berlin and Square Mile Coffee Roasters based in London.
We wanted to answer the following questions:
How competitors products/websites help users achieve their goals?
What pain points and roadblocks can be removed?
How Puku Puku products compares to competitors?
What are they doing really well that we can emulate?
What are they doing not-so-well that we can improve?
What conventions have been established that we need to follow?
Interviews with experts
As mentioned before part of our task was to help the company create a strategy. One important element in our strategy was creating customer delight.
Customer delight is the difference between what customers are willing to pay for a product and the price that actually have to pay. So we wanted to increase this customer delight by increasing the willingness to pay by improving the quality of our product and service and by keeping our prices lower than competition. But as we did not have enough domain knowledge we decided to conduct interviews with two coffee experts.
Cupping sessions
During our field visits we developed some hypothesis. And in order to test those hypothesis we decided to do a cupping session.
Our hypothesis was that people cannot easily distinguish between really expensive coffee and less expensive counterparts. They were also really bad at identifying coffee tasting notes. We conducted a blind test, which is basically asking participants to cup (taste) different coffees side by side and comparing them without giving them any information in advanced about coffees.
Contextual inquiry and skin in the game usability test
In order to further investigate our user needs and confirm some of the hypothesis that we have developed already we decided to conduct contextual inquiry which was a combination of observation and interviews. We asked participants to purchase coffee on one of our competitor’s website and ask them questions during the task.
We also conducted a round of five competitors usability tests. A problem with usability test tasks is that you want participants to carry out the tasks as realistically as possible. But there’s a big difference between pretending to do a task and really doing a task. So we conducted skin in the game usability test by giving 5 participants money and asked them to actually purchase coffee on one of Puku Puku competitors websites.
Analysis
We used thematic analysis to analyze the data from our interviews and contextual inquiries. We conducted the TA using Dovetail in six stages:
We used mainly affinity mapping for analyzing our field visit notes, usability tests, expert interviews and heuristic evaluations.
Deliverables
Our deliverables for this project were:
Actionable insights
In the following I explain some of the actionable insight of our research:
1. Every step of the process matters: In order to brew a good-tasting cup of coffee all the steps in the value chain matter, including quality of green coffee, storage, roasting, packaging and on the side of customers grinding and brewing coffee.
2. Stuck in decision making: We understood that many users have difficulties when it comes to comparing and choosing a bag of coffee both online and in-store. Two main reasons were number of different coffees on offer from competitors in their websites and second abundance of unrelated information regarding coffees that did not contribute meaningfully when purchasing coffee. You can expect to see the following information about a bag of specialty coffee in a website.
The only piece of information that is relevant to customers is FLAVOR. The rest of the information are essential to know when roasting coffee and not when purchasing it.
3. Expensive coffee does not necessary mean better tasting coffee.
4. Score inflation
5. Coffee as energy drinks: There are people who do not really care about the taste of coffee. They see coffee as an energy drink that provides them with a dose of caffein.
6. Invest on your roast: A good roast can elevate the taste more than anything in the supply chain.
7. Physical discomfort associated with Robusta coffee.
8. Misconception leads to dissatisfaction. There are many misconceptions among coffee lovers that could lead to dissatisfaction and distrust. Sometimes specialty coffee roasters describe their coffee as sweet. And by sweet they mean absence of bitterness. But people who are not familiar with such terms expect to taste sweetness in their cup and will be disappointed when they can not perceive it.
Specialty coffee roasters also describe the taste profiles of their coffee. It is very common to see description like: Magnolia, red plum and earl grey tea. There are molecule structures in plum for instance that create the taste and aroma of plum. Similar structures could be created during roast in high quality coffees. But such tastes and aromas are not as distinctive as in a real plum. And for perceiving them you need extensive sensory training. Our research showed that many people not familiar with specialty coffee think that such taste profiles are actually artificial flavoring. Again as they can not perceive those taste they become dissatisfied with the product.
Scope plane and recommendations
In the scope plane, based on our research in the first plane we had to decide about website functional and content requirement. Our team recommendations were:
1. Creating brewing guides in the website: Without following specific brewing steps, you can make a really bad cup of coffee from a really good roasted coffee. In our brew guides we provided information about water quality and temperature, coffee to water ration and extractions.
2. Selling workshops in the website: Workshops are a very effective way for educating people about specialty coffee and promoting the company brand.
3. Selling coffee equipment online: Without good coffee equipment you cannot brew good coffee.
4. Offering online coffee subscriptions
5. Eliminating redundant and misleading content related to coffees
6. Limiting number of coffees on the website to just three types, so customers can easily and fast compare and purchase coffee
7. Offering commodity coffee for those who seek their daily dose of caffein
8. Sell specialty coffee just in the range of 80-83 to keep the price of green coffee low.
Structure plane
In this phase designers created the site map, flows and sketches.
Skeleton and surface plane
In this plane we conducted couple of rounds of usability tests on both low-fidelity and hi-fidelity prototypes.
And finally before the launch of the website we had the final round of usability test. Because we wanted to find out if there is a major usability problem in the website. In case we found a problem then we could have a plan to tackle the problem in the future and also inform our customer service in advance.
