Better usability for a specialty coffee guide (5x success rate, 3x speed, and 2x satisfaction)
There's 1 in 100 chance to bump into a specialty cafe by chance. To make things worse, mainstream platforms (Google, Yelp, etc), label “specialty coffee” loosely (eg including shawarma places), so they are not reliable for conaisseurs.
That's why curated specialty coffee guides are valuable. But they suffer from poor usability and unclear business logic.
My role
Independent initiative of research & testing to demonstrate improvements for Best Coffee Guide, a specialty coffee guide
I've identified where usability failures were masking value and blocking core user tasks, causing unnecessary friction, lost trust, and lost opportunities for upgrade.
Shortest path from research to prototype testing
User research, defining personas, key user stories, and Product Vision
Comparative journey map of main user story, highlighting top pain points
Formulate top 3 issues covering Product Vision completely — and how to fix them.
Prototyping benchmark around the key issues
Issue 1: Lengthy onboarding obscures the business model
Users are not clearly informed that the app downgrades after the free month. After the downgrade, missing results are interpreted as bugs. In testing, only one in five users could identify how to upgrade; on smaller screens, the upgrade CTA was not visible at all.
Issue 2: Difficult access to map view
The primary use case is location-based discovery, yet the app prioritized list views and inconsistent navigation. Comparative journey mapping showed that reaching the desired map view required 22 steps, with multiple failure points where users abandoned the task.
Issue 3: Hard to share with friends
Sharing and directions are part of the core user story. Visibility issues and weak affordances caused users to fail at sharing locations or getting directions, forcing manual workarounds.
I ran moderated usability tests with representative users, iterated on the prototype, and validated improvements against task completion, time, and satisfaction.
Task completion got five times better, and time spent on task reduced almost four times.
Users reached the map view with fewer steps and fewer failure points.
Upgrade intent was no longer blocked by hidden or unclear CTAs.
Sharing and navigation tasks were completed more reliably.
Recommendations
A short list of recommendations for development, based on benchmark results and focusing on changes with highest impact and lowest implementation cost.
Best Coffee Guide vs improvement benchmark
Conclusion
Curated guides fill a real gap that apps like Google Maps never will. The problem is when usability failures make users question whether the product even works. Getting that out of the way is enough — the curation does the rest.