Thomas Sweet: In-store to Mobile App
Case Study: Part 1
This case study is a personal redesign for Thomas Sweet and was completed over the course of two weeks. This is the first part of a two-part case study — Part 2 is continued here. All information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of Thomas Sweet.
Understanding the Business
Thomas Sweet is a regional ice cream and sweets shop with a handful of locations on the East Coast. Their website is centered around allowing you to “find your happy place” and I wanted to challenge myself to enhance that experience.
Research
To better understand the needs of the patrons of Thomas Sweet and people who frequent ice cream shops in general, I created a survey made up of quantitative and qualitative questions and conducted a series of interviews. This data helped me hone in on underlying motivations, habits, and preferences for dessert consumption.
After synthesizing the data collected, I created an affinity map to pull out common themes. The emotional connection with eating dessert, the holistic experience of going out to get dessert, menu variety, and health consciousness were a few of the themes that were highlighted many times in the data.
Define
Based on this research, I began crafting a persona that reflected the needs, frustrations, and behaviors present in the data and a problem statement for this persona.
The journey map above walks through the purchase life cycle for the persona and highlights the pain points and emotions felt through each touchpoint. The problem I decided to solve addresses the persona’s state of being overwhelmed due to unclear menus and a plethora of unorganized choices that you may encounter at ice cream shops.
Ideate
Based on the persona and problem statement, I created three “How Might We” statements which I used to facilitate an engaging ideation session via Zoom.
The ideation session led to many potential opportunities for features. I then boiled these ideas down using another affinity map and pulled out three of the six features below to prioritize.
Solution
For the MVP, I decided to focus on these three features to tackle the biggest needs for customers through a mobile app experience. They would aim to create a streamlined experience allowing customers to know exactly what they want to order ahead of entering the store and providing health-conscious customers a way to find options based on their needs and preferences. They also include the added benefit of skipping the line entirely by ordering for in-store picking.
The user flow below demonstrates how a customer may navigate through these features.
After I mapped out the user flow, I sketched some low-fidelity wireframes to start visualizing the various screens for these features and then incorporated them into my paper prototype.
I used Marvel to create the interactive paper prototype below so I could walk through the features myself and conduct usability testing with participants to see if any features needed to be adjusted.
Takeaways & Next Steps
Through usability testing, I was able to uncover a pain point in task number two. In a future iteration, I would include a home button/icon that will be accessible on all screens so that users can easily navigate to and from various places within the app.
