UX/UI Case Study: Fixing usability for specialty coffee guides

Introduction

Overview | You save me from bad coffee, I save you from bad UX | Who needs a saviour? | Reality check | Role and process

Overview

I can’t stand bad coffee. Good coffee is so easy to make, yet 99% of all coffee places make a poor job of it. Bad coffee can ruin my day.

Because I had no guide for specialty cafés, I’ve slowly developed heuristics to help me decide if a place is worth even trying. Eventually, a North London barista told me about the Best Coffee Guide [abbr. BCG] and my coffee life changed ever since. BCG saved me from bad coffee.

Disclaimer: I’m in no way affiliated with BCG.

But the BCG app has some flaws:

Testing with five users is said to reveal the most frequent usability problems

Since they saved me from bad coffee, I wanted to save them from bad UX — this case study is about increasing the number of premium accounts with the least effort. A quick heuristic evaluation also shows a number of critical usability problems while using the app — and I’ve chosen to look deeper at the…