Overview
Starbucks is the world’s largest coffeehouse chain. But it faces a lot of stiff competition at a local level from smaller independent coffee shops and chains. As well as other large global coffeehouse chains.
In Starbucks’ case, the smaller chains provide a convenient, personal, and memorable customer experience.
One advantage Starbucks has over the smaller chains and some of the larger ones, is a rewards scheme and app.
But the app had low customer ratings and engagement and they wanted to improve this to improve returning customers by incentivising their loyalty via their app.
Problem statement
The Starbucks app had low engagement, low usage and didn't inspire loyalty. Starbucks wanted to know what could do improve the rewards program and app engagement to inpire loyalty.
Users and audience
Starbucks' core audience were millenials and gen Z who go to Starbucks multiple times a week with friends, on their way to work or to study. They also have older audiences who commute or visit their local stores.
Roles and responsibilities
The project team: Senior Experience Designer (me), Early Stage Designer, Experience Director (Oversight), Senior Project Manager, Client Partner.
My personal roles in the project:
- User testing facilitation and note taking
- Stakeholder management
- Leading the project
- Writing a recruitment brief
- Managing the recruitment partner recruiting participants
- Writing a discussion guide
- User research facilitation
- Workshop facilitation
- Research analysis
- Research playback to the client
- Experience mapping
Scope and constraints
While we had to think of this in the context of the UK, Starbucks are an international company so we needed to bear in mind that this scheme could be rolled out to other territories, in particular the middle east
Process and what I did
Firstly we held a stakeholder workshop to decide on the direction or the project and pull out ideas we wanted to test in the new app prototype.
We then set up testing and recruited 11 participants all between 21 and 30 - Starbucks key audience. We decided to test in 2 stores in London, both in different locations with different audience bases. One in Westfield (White City, London) and the other in Turnham Green (London) near Starbucks' London office. This allowed us not to just test the app concept but look at the problem from an ethnographic perspective in store to see how people behave from when they walk in to leaving the store.
Following this we analysed the results and compiled a report.
We also produced an experience map of the order process.
Outcomes and lessons
We developed an interactive prototype to communicate the changes to the loyalty programme, including five “onboarding” screens and a representative example of how the new tiers could be structured. We also included a selection of different rewards drawn from some additional research from Accenture research in order to gauge what was of most interest to our participants.
In addition to interviews, we also conducted an ethnographic study observing how people behave before, during and after they purchase, paying close attention. In particular if and how they used their phone and engage with the Starbucks app. We spoke to many customers while they waited for their coffees to get a sense of how many were using it and their overall sentiment towards it, and talked to colleagues about their experience of customers using it. We paid attention to the whole service environment which constitutes the context of the app.
We focused the report around the following objectives and themes:
- Do people “get” the structure of the new loyalty programme and do they find £1 to a hundred stars easier to understand than three?
- Which new rewards offered the most value to people? Which would drive better engagement?
- What are people's experiences with the existing loyalty programme?
- Understand people’s habits and behaviours with loyalty programs.
- Understand people’s habits and behaviour within Starbucks in relation to using the in App rewards.
- Proposed new program mechanics and new proposed rewards.
- Habits and behaviours.
- In-store habits and behaviours.
Stakeholder workshop:
Some of our findings from the report:
Experience map:
Tools
Figjam, Figma, Zoom, Dovetail, Airtable
Role
Senior Experience Designer
