2023
The Tea Shop App
A 3-days boba-tastic workshop to develop an application for a Thai boba shop called 'the Tea Shop’ where the deliverables include high fidelity designs for homepage and product detail page, as well as communication to promote the app.
🎖won first place 📝 Presentation deck is available on request
Key Responsibilities:
User Research, Market Research, UI Design, Communication Plan
Both qualitative and quantitative research were conducted to understand customer behavior towards food-drink ordering and how they use F&B applications, as well as how other F&B competitors are utilizing their app.
A social listening and survey were conducted to gain an overall insight. From this, it’s clear that most boba drinkers are younger women, who, while enjoying drinking boba, are also concerned about their health.
When looking into F&B companies, most of them use apps to as part of their loyalty program: promote promotions, redeem reward, make purchases at cashier, and sometimes delivery.
Reframing
Scope
Interview: As learned from social listening and survey that women are more likely to purchase bubble tea, I conducted semi-structured interviews with two female participants to learn more about their behavior and pain points when ordering bubble tea and their usage of F&B app
The Tea Shop is a bubble tea chainstore based in Thailand. Currently, their only social presence are from Yelp and Instagram. They are looking to create their own app to enhance their online touchpoints.
Based on the limited information, a hypothesis is drawn that Tea Shop has the operational capacity for delivery services but faces challenges in establishing substantial customer connections thus wanting to increase its presence by increasing digital touch points.
This hypothesis led to a fundamental question “Is an application truly necessary? Is there other solutions to get the brand to engage with their audience?”
Background
Findings
Opportunities
While app benefits users by allowing them to take more time to customize and order their drink from wherever they are, customers rarely open a stand-alone F&B app unless they’re at a storefront, and only use it to collect points and make purchases.
To conclude, I suggested the client to create a web app instead, as it allows customers to customize their drinks and save their preferences while remains cost-effective, accessible, and has less friction.
Key insights are drawn from the research and translated into 3 opportunities which I believe would drive revenue and set the app apart from its competitor the most, this includes:
Group Ordering:
Get more orders from one delivery. Drive revenue by hijacking the fact that users often buy drinks together with friends and colleague after lunch (this is especially helpful to the brand since the order revenue per delivery will be higher)Customization & Dietary Preference:
Save dietary preference for next order and expand customer base by recommending menus that fit the user’s lifestyleMenu Rating
Social proofs to increase option exploration when launching new flavors
Uh-oh Moment
Additional information we received are: the brand has an unlimited budge + it’s only based only in Thailand + They want it to be app no matter what
Visual Language
Upon assessing competitors on how they market their products and the conversation consumers have online and offline, I’ve discovered that beyond flavor and texture of boba, the topic of country origin often arises.
Interestingly, with the exception of bubble tea establishments originating in Taiwan, most brands tend to shy away from referencing their country of origin and utilizing related visual elements and would use visuals that are considered to be modern or neutral
UI Design
UI is an integral part of marketing, as it is a space where the users interact with your brand environment directly. The 3 features introduced took into consideration how the platform can hook (incentivize with group order), retain (dietary personalization) and engage (rating)
01/ Incentivize large orders through Group Ordering
A tiered pricing model is used to incentivize people to purchase more, which is supported through Group Ordering feature. This is advertised on a promotion banner which the user will see upon entering the app
02/ Protect users with allergy and diet Filter
Make sure users stay on top of their allergies and food preferences and avoid any mistakes when ordering. Users can also add their friends or family dietary preferences as well.
03/ Invite exploration through Menu Rating
Get users to try new menus with social proof that makes them feel more secure when exploring alternative
Riding the wave of Taiwanese boba with a twist
Thais go crazy for Taiwanese boba, believing that if the shop originates from Taiwan, then it’s deemed to taste better.
The campaign is a play of words, Taiwanese to Thai-wan-nese (Thai=Thai, Wan=Sweet,Nese/nid=little) Which altogether can be ‘Thai, little sweet’ answering to a concern of boba being too sweet
Altogether the campaign would promote the shop as a Thai boba tea that offers less sweet boba.
#ไทยหวานนิสส #Thaiwanese
Communication
DESIGN & COMMUNICATION
Thailand is a street food destination and always ranks high as a tourist destination, our culture is indeed a big opportunity!
Thai street food culture is chaotic, loud, but also bright and bold. I decided to use this as our brand visual images. Not only this represents the country origin of the brand, but it also stands out from the sea of minimalistic and pastel boba shops.
Culture! Culture
Soft power is a differentiator!
The campaign is separated into 3 phases. Starting from using micro-influencers to carry a conversation about bubble tea’s sweetness and how there’s a new Thai brand that claimed to be a Taiwanese tea, before revealing that it is ‘Thai-wan-nese’!
To create even more conversation and drive sales, we challenge people to do group orders, where the largest group will win a free boba drink from the brand for an entire month!
Lastly, when it comes to retaining customer, we roll out a loyalty program based on the amount of drinks customer have bought.
Getting people to talk about us