Prompt: “Collaborate, research, iterate, and implement. Develop a research-driven, design engineering project that illuminates your passions, skills, and professional ambitions.”
Role: Design Strategist, Product Manager
Responsibilities: Product Roadmap + Strategy, UX Research, Branding, Prototyping, Project Management
Organization(s): Brown University + Rhode Island School of Design
Photo Credit: Vivian Chan
Photo Credit: Vivian Chan
Photo Credit: Vivian Chan
Photo Credit: Vivian Chan
Problem Statement
Coffee culture has lost the communal experience of the Enlightenment-era coffeehouses and the cognitive load of brewing pour-over coffee is too heavy on the brewer to facilitate an engaged experience that can build community.
Mission Statement
In the 17th and 18th century coffeehouses, community was built through a flowing exchange of ideas, perspectives, and coffee. We are enabling the brewers of today to recreate this experience by facilitating community building through the participation in coffee artistry.
UX Storyboard
Ideation + Design
For this project, we operated on two-week cycles of design sprint. This meant taking the first day to meet and review and summarize the insights from the previous cycle’s product testing, followed by 4 days of diverging and converging on independent design sketches of our individual interpretations of the insights. We solicited outside feedback on these design sketches to pull out elements that best represented the insights generated from testing. With this, we converged on a final design sketch that would move forward into prototyping. We spent another 4 days developing a build plan, sourcing materials and constructing the prototypes. The remainder of the design sprints were spent product testing.
Prototyping + Testing
We have made a concerted effort to make sure that all decisions made in the iterations for prototyping are based on evidence. This meant undergoing rigorous testing of each prototype, using both quantitative and qualitative methods ranging from survey designs of Likert-scale questions and semi-structured user interviews. With the insights generated and summarized, we moved on to the next stage of designing and constructing the prototypes with established research questions to ensure that each cycle is purpose-driven. All prototypes included materials design discussions so that functionality is not compromised. This included 3D modelling and printing, laser cutting, and assembling components to optimize for testability and iteration.
