In addition to being a UX designer, I’m also the “mom” of a mom-and-pop espresso bar located in New York City. Together with my husband, who is the day-to-day CEO of the business, I’ve spent 10 years building a community hub for coffee, art, music and more. Like a great digital start-up product, we started out small with the most important features: great coffee, a few good pastries, a friendly storefront and some art on the walls. As time and thousands of customers put our shop through real-life usability testing, we made rounds of tweaks to “update” our shop, and then 2 years ago, “relaunched” our shop in a larger format, the design informed by all those hours spent working with the initial prototype and dreaming up ways to make it better.
We started our business following a menu and schedule model we had seen find success in Manhattan. It quickly became apparent that neither of these would find us the same success in a residential part of Queens. If we had stood fast to that model, we would surely have failed. Instead, we listened to our staff and to our customers and made the changes necessary to align more to their needs, which drove our earnings where they needed to be.
Here are some lessons we have learned over 10 caffeine-driven years that I take into every UX project I do:
There are no rules in UX Design — it all depends. An espresso shot should be easy — you grind your beans to a certain fineness, you use a certain amount in the portafilter, you pull the shot for a certain time, and voila! the perfect shot — right? Wrong! Every varietal has its own density and flavor timing, the humidity and temperature of the air changes how water moves through the grounds, and every barista tamps down his or her shot in their own way. Getting the perfect shot is a matter of recalibrating your machine every day and running a few shots each morning to test and get them right for the conditions that day.
Working in UX is much like this — you start with an initial idea, and then make changes quickly if you see that the data and testing aren’t backing up your original plan. It’s a little scary, but learning to trust the data is helpful.
We seek to solve real-world problems. If you want to get practice at quickly solving problems you never thought you would have, open your own business — you’ll have a lot from which to choose. Sometime, when we meet in person over beers, I’ll share some stories about laptops and coffee shops…
It’s fun to think about all the different ways you can improve someone’s life with a UX product — from the big idea to the small app that tells you when it has switched over to iced coffee season.
Research is our secret weapon. Confession time: I sneak into a certain green-logoed coffee bar every few months to look around and see what’s new. And I check out a bunch of other coffee, tea and snack places as well. We can’t be well situated in the marketplace if we don’t get out and see it.
I love seeing what is going on in users’ minds and lives for my UX projects. It’s very easy to get stuck in what life looks like from behind your eye sockets, but it won’t get you anywhere with your projects if they are going to be meaningful for anyone besides you.
Our curiosity leads to forward-thinking discoveries. Two words: Honeybee Latte. Our year-round best seller with espresso, honey, and vanilla was created because my husband played around one day to see what he could create with a few ingredients that he liked on their own.
A low-fi prototype is not that much more time-consuming to make than a espresso drink — and it lets you try your craziest ideas quick and fast.
The collective is stronger than the individual. Some of our best ideas have come from our employees — if we hadn’t encouraged their creativity, we wouldn’t have some of our most popular menu items. Also, we are better off having neighboring businesses as friends rather than competitors. You never know when you will run out of straws on a hot summer day; the pizza place around the corner will think nothing of lending you a couple of boxes if you lent them a case of napkins last month.
Working on a UX team is no different — being generous with your ideas results in a better product for the whole team. It’s very tempting to let your competitive side take hold of you, but ultimately, working together and finding great collaborators will take your work where you want it to go.