Tea log
A sprint
A 5 day sprint to aiming to explore the complexities of the specialized tea drinking and tasting culture, and create a digital platform for tea enthusiasts everywhere.
Role
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Facilitate the sprint
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Research primary and secondary
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UX/UI design of prototype
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Document the results
Tools
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Adobe illustrator
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Adobe XD
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Adobe Premiere
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Marvel
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Lots of tea
Year
2019
Goals
Create idea and prototype ideas for a digital notebook for all things tea to aid the tea enthusiast on his journey recording, sharing, buying and learning about tea.
Sprint questions
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Is there a market for a tea enthusiasts product ?
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How could we make the learning, recording process delightful and engaging for users?
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Could this product be effectively monetised?
Day 1 - Rapid Research and User focus
Are you out there?
One of the important questions we wanted to answer, was if this product was necessary and desirable. Did tea enthusiasts around the world dream of a platform where they can share about tea, learn and maybe even buy tea. We decided the best place to start was instagram. It seemed apparent the migration of tea users from forums and reddit to instagram and other social media, to share and discuss about tea. We decided to conduct some user research two fold:
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We would use instagram stories and run a quick survey or poll and ask some questions about the communities motivations for using the platform and where and how they log, and learn about tea.
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We would also reach out to individuals in the instagram community and ask them to elaborate more personally about their experiences sharing tea on digital platforms, as well as their logging, and buying habits.
Personas - sharer or carer?
We then proceeded to turn our interviews into personas, so we could begin to understand more specifically the needs and motivations of these tea specialists and hobbyists.
Some questions we asked were:
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How long have you been avidly drinking tea?
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How and from what channels do you learn and inform yourself about tea?
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How do you see the future of your tea hobby/practice developing?
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What challenges, if any, do you face: learning about tea, buying tea and or connecting to the tea community?
What did we learn
Our assumptions were confirmed that indeed instagram has become a tool for recording tea experiences, learning about tea, and in some cases making decisions about buying tea. The other aspect which really struck us was how much it meant to the tea community that they could share this with one another. Drinking tea alone is suddenly more fun with a world of friends in your pocket.
"I feel the tea community I have met so far are wonderfully welcoming and so many people are happy & willing to share their knowledge if you show an interest"
More specifically
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Sharing on Instagram is for fun and to connect and get feedback.
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Personal recommendations and ratings is an important way for users to make decisions about buying tea.
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Logging tea is important and mostly still manual in notebooks.
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Connecting over social media as a means to meet different people from the tea community is also a motivation
The personas also led us to the conclusion that their are two groups of tea heads on social media, those who want to learn more about tea, but have quite internal motivations, and those who have tea related businesses or expertise who share their knowledge and opinions.
Day 2 - Landscape and Journey
Has this been done before?
Day two was about taking a look around other products on the market and trying to figure out if it can be done. There are not very many apps out there oriented towards tea, so we turned to other similar products and settled on two examples one for coffee and one for wine.
Vivino - Buy the right wine.
"Trusted by millions to discover and buy the right wine every time."
Things we liked
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Simple to use app that connects one to wine shops alllover the world
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You can add wines by scanning a bar code and adding them to your list
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Under profile one can keep track of teas to buy, teas tried, and teas in ones cellar
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The app encourages making friends and sharing wines and tastings
Opportunites
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The only way to log wine is to scan the bar code, and link it to products on data base.
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There isn't a real connection to other social media platforms
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The app is oriented towards selling wine, and feels less like a platform for wine lovers
Angels Cup - A coffee hunter's weapon of choice.
"Our coffee app helps you learn about coffee. Record tasting notes, compare answers with pros, and remember all the things you've tried."
Things we liked
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Adding information about tasting notes is really fun and detailed
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You can compare your tasting with the roast masters with an overlay of both tasting graphs
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There is consideration about making the tasting notes individual
Opportunities
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You can only log tastings about coffees on their platform
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There is no way to add friends on the app or connect to a community
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One cannot export your tasting to social media
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Pictures are not a part of the logging process
User Journeys
The next important step was to create some user journeys and look carefully at how both the external and internal user are logging and buying tea today (both over instagram).
Logging and sharing on instagram
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Tea tasting notes are complex, as it has to do with method of brewing, brewing devices, water as well as tea
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These notes are hard to organise and then connect to teas, especially when recorded on different devices
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Those who post regularly on social media have to journal, or memo tastings carefully to keep track of which tea and which tasting
Buyings tea from instagram feed
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Tea is complex and users have to constantly research what they are buying or looking at
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In-App browsers can be a pain point for people buying from within another app
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There is no connection from picture from instagram feed to product online the user must constantly connect the dots
Brand voice and key words
We ended the day thinking about the opportunities in the user journeys, and what we learned from our case studies. The tea community shared not so they could buy tea more effectively but more so to connect to one another and learn about tea. There was some pain points with regards to sharing and logging, which means those inclined to share information and knowledge have to invest more and more time into it. We decides that our focus would be on the platform building, creating a good record of tea shops and rating teas will also naturally connect to buying and selling tea, but the product should focus on the goal of encouraging logging, rating and sharing tea with friends family and the community. This is contrast to Vivino which is oriented to selling wine, and Angels Cup which is oriented to tasting coffee and creating a record.
Day 3 - Ideate and Prototype
Inspiration and lessons learned
After studying these products carefully we began to see a clearer picture of Tea Log and we formulated some "How Might We" questions with our ideas in mind, we then organized these into categories of Exploring and Buying, Learning and Logging and Connecting and Community and voted on the most important points to develop moving forward.
Exploring and buying
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HMW- connect to vendors?
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HMW - help users buy the best tea?
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Learning and Logging
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HMW- help people learn about tea ?
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HMW- make logging easy and intuitive?
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HMW- compare teas and tastings?
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HMW- make sharing to social media effective?
Connecting and community
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HMW- connect tea heads to the community ?
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HMW- let tea heads give each other feedback and advice?
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HMW- facilitate tea swapping?
Ideate finally!
Finally ready to sketch we began to ideate! Some CRAZY EIGHTS and NAPKIN SKETCHES later and we were on to our first paper prototype. We connected the wireframes together on Marvel and had a clickable prototype, and really began to think about iterations for the structure of the app. After some testing with the Marvel prototype we already learnt a lot about the hierarchy of the information and decided to change the main menu buttons to seperate My Teas from Profile. This was in order to really focus on the collection of logs, wish lists and orders and give it its own home on the platform.
Day 4 & 5 - Prototype some more and Document
How should a tea app look?
Tea log itself was not a brand, it was more of a concept of a tea enthusiast, but it did have a look to its social media and that was consistent allover the tea world. Warm earthy colours. Simplicity. And classical elements. Tea photography is wonderfully dynamic in its pouring shots, as well as beautifully stable in its clay and tea wares being showed off. We decided to go for simple UI elements, with whites, off whites and a hint of brown. The photos which will, make up the logs , should be the star of the show. With this in mind the app came to life.
What is next?
Seeing the product come to life was really inspiring moving forward, we had some informal tests to see if the flow of the app made sense, which it did. It is important to note that the hardest and most important flow of logging is still not fully developed. This would require another level of research into how is tea actually tasted, which terms are used most often and which flavour profiles need to be mentioned to give everyone the chance to log in their own way. What also needs to be explored more thoroughly is the relationship that tea shops would have with the app. In this prototype we did not make it clear where one can find tea shops, or whether they would just log, or if their products would only appear in the logs of others. This is unclear as per this prototype. The next steps would be to plan out the information architecture in detail, and see where the best home for the shops would be and to decide if they are an important stakeholder or another user we need to consider.
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