Cropster Cafe

Cropster Cafe is a B2B browser application that can improve and share brewing standards, track coffee quality, plus manage cafe-related tasks across locations, staff and equipment.

Problem

Speciality coffee cafes have a difficult time providing consistently brewed coffee across various locations and staff.

The way most cafes at the moment keep track of their recipes, brew parameters, tasks, consistency, and maintain brew equipment is done through pen and paper or a spreadsheet. This is very limiting when it comes to sharing recipes and brewing consistently across multiple cafe locations and all members of staff. This is also confining when it comes to training new staff within an industry with a high turnover in staff.

Since Cropster already helps coffee roasteries, farms, and labs with consistency, traceability, and quality control, developing a software solution for cafes was the natural next step toward completing the company's mission of benefitting everyone in the coffee supply chain.

Solution

A software solution that enables cafes to improve and share brewing standards, track coffee quality, and manage tasks.

The focus with Cropster Cafe was to create a digital solution that would seamlessly fit into the quick work-pace of the cafe manager as well as the barista. An added benefit of Cropster Cafe software solution is the traceability aspect. Through the Cropster software, the coffee a customer is sipping at your cafe can be traced back to the specific roasts, green coffees, and farms where the cup of coffee originated from.

Some of the project deliverables were brew recipe creation and management, brew quality reporting, staff and equipment-related task management, and cafe user onboarding. The solution was built into the existing Cropster browser application, thus dealing with some technical and conceptual limitations of a legacy system.

Early stages and research

Together with the product manager, based on surveys and interviews done with the end-users, we defined user stories and user journeys for the initial MVP. While doing so we also concluded 2 main personas that our software would target: the Cafe manager and the Barista.

The research also showed that the software has to be mobile-first and fit into an existing (Cropster) browser application that so far has had a desktop-first approach when it comes to design. This meant redesigning many of the existing components in the Cropster Design System.

Research findings

As a next step, I created Lo-Fi wireframes and prototypes that we could use for field testing. Throughout this step, development was also included for consulting purposes. Afterward, we headed out to specialty coffee cafes all over Vienna, where we tested our initial prototype and solution with tens of baristas and cafe managers. With their feedback, the pain points in our initial solution were clear. I modified the designs and tested them again. Through this process, we were able to create the first live MVP of Cropster Cafe.

Design deliverables and iterations

In the building phase, I created high-fidelity prototypes and worked continuously with development to implement the designs. I also had regular calls with cafes that matched our target audience where I was able to validate our concepts. As I worked on this project for over a year, I focused on continuous discovery habits to constantly better our application.