Service Design: Coffee Break
This project was a collaboration between myself and 5 other students in an interdisciplinary team effort in our Service Design course during my master studies. My main responsibilities in this project included user interviews, user testing, feedback analysis, feature definition, developing and creating a visual profile as well as designing the user interface and creating a clickable prototype.
Our chosen case was to create a service based on our own experiences during the months of the Covid-19 pandemic. We found that the social aspects of life were what we missed the most, and we wanted to create a service which could emulate a real life café experience in a safe, digital space. We drew inspiration for physical cafés and conducted user interviews in order to find out which aspects of a café visit were the most important to our users. Coffee Break is a digital café platform in which users can meet at digital cafés and socialize while staying inside and staying safe during situations such as the pandemic. We also wanted to emphasize that many people struggle to go outside on a daily basis for various reason, and not just during the pandemic. This service is also meant to be a low threshold platform of socialization for all potential users.
The service includes cafés based on different moods and themes, and users can choose the one they want to visit on a map. They may then invite their friends along, at which point they will enter a minimalistic video chat with a backdrop based on the café they chose. Users are able to open a café menu within the digital space which they can use to order various types of coffee/beverages and/or baked goods from local cafés. These wares will be brought to the user through delivery service partners. There is also an option to enable, disable and adjust background noise and music like one would hear in a physical café in order to further increase the users' level of immersion.
Some highlights from the feature set:
– Low threshold socialization for all types of users
– Order coffee and food from the comfort of your home and have it delivered to your door
– Partnerships with real cafés to be used as digital café spaces as well as providing ordered goods
– Meet random people from all over the world in a safe, moderated, digital café space
– Real world background noise from physical cafés or from other users present in the same café (This feature would require consent from all users/people involved and must adhere to privacy laws)
