Fika Finder

A mobile app to help coffee lovers find cafés that suit their preferences more easily based on interior style, occasion, amenities and seat availability. This was a fun month-long personal project through which I first learned and utilized fundamental UX Design skills (i.e. it is not a real app...yet).

Timeline: Aug - Sept 2019

App Flow

Problem & Goals

As a café-hopper and coffee lover myself, I often found the process of finding cafés to work or hang out with friends extremely frustrating - especially in a bustling city like Hong Kong (HK). I also realized that my family and friends were experiencing the same frustration. In this sense, the goal of my project was to inform people's journeys in finding coffee shops that suited their needs by providing seat availability metrics in real-time and information about the functional and aesthetic traits of those spaces.

Design Process

User Research

Demography: HK residents, coffee lovers, freelancers, office workers and students.
To find out: Validate that finding seating is a problem and identify additional pain points when it comes to finding coffee shops.

Despite the small sample size, my survey confirmed that there was a potentially significant market of people who rely on coffee shops to meet with people.

Interestingly, although few respondents found it difficult to find coffee shops with enough seats, many of them still worried about the process of finding them. As such, I decided to focus on designing a mobile app to ease their negative feelings towards the search journey rather than to solve the actual problem of finding seats (although it could still do that too).

Design Concept

Functional & Fun

Opposed to OpenRice (HK’s Yelp) and Google Maps, it is an app specialized for café-searching. The trivia-style search makes search process quicker, easier and fun.

Aesthetic

Cozy but inspiring aesthetic with a caffeinated twist.

Fika

Fika is a Swedish phrase meaning ‘to have coffee.' It implies a deeper cultural meaning that refers to a working culture based on balance of wellbeing, productivity and connection.

Dominant color beige to reflect neutrality and color of coffee, and evoke feelings of calmness.

Trivia with large round buttons organized in a grid inspired by mobile app (currently unavailable) that generates games to alleviate boredom during queueing based on a series of questions (e.g. no. of players, expected queueing time).

Simple but colorful iconography (sourced from Flaticon.com) for a fun trivia experience.

Search results for cafes portrayed as cards, similar to Yelp, to summarize key traits of each cafe (more details below).

Search Categories:

Location - North Point, Quarry Bay etc.
Café Size - Small, Medium, Large
Seating Availability -
Noise Levels -
Food/Drink Rating -
Interior Design - Hipster, Minimalist etc.

Future Potential Search Categories:

Price Range
Indoor Lighting

Results

Since the app remained in its conceptual design phase, there were no tangible success metrics. However, after showing it to my respondents and their friends, they provided a lot of positive feedback. They particularly fancied the trivia search and the cozy aesthetics, mentioning that those features would make their café-finding journeys more enjoyable. They also suggested expanding the trivia portion and doing more research on how to really implement the featured coffee shop metrics as they looked forward to seeing this project on app stores in the future.

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