Daily Caffeinated

Research on current products illuminated a gap in the social network and sharing market. Most reward programs for small businesses revolve around market analytics and point of sale systems. None of the products sought to bring curious people together with new experiences, rather focusing on customer retention or bringing first time visitors back. A few social network style apps for reviews of shops and local coffee culture do exist, but their presence is primarily in their founding locations (namely Australia and the United Kingdom).

The feature map below visualizes this gap in the market. Down along the left are the important features being considered for the Daily Caffeinated app. Red colored features are the most integral, and decreasing in importance for orange and yellow colored. Across the top are a selection of apps, websites, and services that are related to this problem or an adjacent market (such as Untapped, which provides similar features for the beer community). Black boxes indicate which features these products have, while the empty color spaces show where there are gaps in coverage of this particular market. Click on the names of the products to see their websites and learn more about that product.

The large red space at the top of the map adequately shows the lack of services for the boutique coffee industry.

Some changes suggested in user feedback were in relation to usability, such as increased font size and larger button areas. I also received many comments about the repeated features – which I used to show a concept and keep the app feeling like a work in progress needing improvement. Some other observations I made when test users were exploring the app were the tendency to want to swipe left and right on photos or scroll up and down on a feed for more information. These natural (or trained) motions could be implemented to make navigation simpler and easy to figure out.