‘Here we can offer you hope to live a more social life, to make friends. We are
trying to help but we are not focused on goals. We are trying to create hope.’
Café Parasolen
Café Parasolen
Project Overview
SECTOR: Hospitality, Food and Beverage
METHODS: Interview Guide –Mood board –List of Requirements –Values –User Persona –Website optimization –Design System –Code
CHALLENGES: To redesign the website with the aim of captivating users and implementing highly functional coding.
TEAM: 6 people
TIMEFRAME FOR THE PROJECT :2 weeks
Introduction:
Your realize that your family and friends aren't around sits heaviest on your heart as you spend another lonely
evening at home. Isolation seems to last forever. You have an idea of what might help you with your isolation
once you open your laptop and go to the nearest café website. However, you realize that the online platform
failed to capture your interest and give up.
That seems like a great service, doesn't it? What can be done to keep and enhance the attention of future
visitors, and how?
Project Summary
THE CLIENT: Social cafe has existed for 28 years now. Allan had started operating at the company 2 and a half years ago on January 20th. It
was founded by the church board and since then it is a social cafe for the lonely and mentally vulnerable. Their mission is to offer work,
based on church values. Throughout the years they have always offered cheap food. They call their customers guests. They make sure
people are not sitting alone in their apartment by trying to create a home
THE AUDIENCE: All website visitors seeking information on cost, location, position, and mood.
THE PROBLEM: How can the website be updated to better engage users, attract more visitors, and cut down on the time it takes to find
what they're looking for?
Desk Research
The complexity of the customer experience is likely to be evident during website visits. Customer service may be the company's
main point of contact, but the technical communication is uninteresting, and visitors struggle to discover the right data among
the whole website.
FINDINGS: Due to lacking information, the technician was unable to locate information on the first visit. For instance, the
website does not offer data about when you may volunteer or how to apply, etc.
Interview Questions
Purpose of this interview: Find out pain points in the user experience of customers in the company and which digital changes would solve
it.
According to Jakob Nielsen the best user testing results come from testing no more than five users. After the fifth user, you waste
your time by observing the same findings and not learning anything new.
During the interviews we used the following two approaches:
Attitudinal –Listening to users’ words.
Behavioral –Observing their actions.
We not only asked them questions before but also observed them during their visitation.
Topics:
-Understand who are the customers and what are they needs
What kind of problems do they face which can be overcome by our solution
-Uncover the existing issues with current platform (we know it’s quite messy and have some ideas how to emphasize the goals Allan
have, but still the more perspective we have the better)
-Which services are the most popular in this social cafe, the reason people/volunteers go there
-What are the key building factors of this cafe (people, volunteers, activities, food, drinks, helping center?)
Questions for employee:
-For how long have you been working here?
-How does your typical work day here look like?
-How does working here make you feel?
-What brings you the most joy in the working environment?
-On the contrary, is there anything that bothers you?
-What do you think is the most important in this social cafe?
-Have you observed what are the most popular services amongst customers?
-Could you summarize what this social cafe is for people?
Questions for the manager:
-What led you to start a business in that particular industry?
-Why do you do what you do? What kind of impact are you trying to make with your work?
-What do you believe makes you different from your competitors?
-How do customers get to know about this place? Advertisements, reference?
-What is the most common age range of your customers?
-How well do you think your brand communicates to your customers?
-Do you think your customers trust your product/service?
-What aspects of your product/service do users care most about, and why?
-Imagine if you were one of your customers - what would your impression be of the overall
experience of the product/service you are delivering?
Questions for the customers:
- What is your age?
- How often do you come to this cafe? Is this your first time here?
- Why did you choose to come here? How did you find it? (ads, advice from friends)
- Was it difficult for you to find this place the first time you came here?
- Can you describe your visit here for the first time? What did you do, when you just arrived?
- When you think of Cafe Parasollen, what do you associate it with?
- How would you describe the atmosphere in the café?
- Do you use the cafe's website?
- How do you get information about the cafe's activities?
- Which activities are you most interested in participating in?
- Are you a volunteer? If yes, how do you apply for it?
- Is there something else you would like this cafe to offer?
- Do you also visit other places? / Why did you choose this one rather than competitors?
Summary of what they said-
manager:
•Our dream is to create hope so they can give the mentally distressed people motivation to pursue their dreams. They encourage
people to dream. ‘Here we can offer you hope to live a more social life, to make friends. We are trying to help but we are not focused
on goals. We are trying to create hope. ’
•Why I choose this café, well I tried another place, I went there a couple of times, but the third time I was there they didn’t even
remember my name.
•People are coming because they know they are welcome. They sometimes come and bitch about life. For some it is just to eat, they are
not able to cook for themselves or when you are faced with an empty bed or living room at home.
•Our guests always ask us for help when they needed it. They rely on our services.
•If I was a costumer I hope I would meet someone welcoming me, by looking me in the eyes and saying: “Hi you are really welcome
here!”
•Not all our guests shower that well - so I expect somebody to not smell as good as me. I hope that I will be welcomed even if I have a
bad day. I would expect to have a room where there aren't so many people - if I have social anxiety I might find it a little intimidating. I
would be glad to know that there is a place downstairs that is a little more private.
Summary of what they said-
costumers:
•Iam visiting the cafe between 2 and 4 times per week and I am spending about 3h per day there.
•I experienced an accident that kept me in bed - I was unable to walk. I went to therapy in the cafe and there they helped me to walk
longer distances. Now I am extremely happy that I found this community.
•Exciting - that’s how I felt for the 1st time coming into the Cafe –people are friendly. If someone is drunk or high they kick them out the
door, the violent people aren't tolerated here and I feel safe.
•Mostly I find information on the door. The website is not that accurate so I prefer to count on the written on the papers.
•The atmosphere is so friendly, they help people like me in so many ways. I cant imagine how I would survive if I didn’t discover the café
but for sure I would have ended up in a hospital.
Summary of what they said-
employee and volunteers:
•I think I started to develop mental illness at some point in my career as a business owner –I was overthinking, overworking. In my
upbringing, at dinner for instance, the matter of the conversation had been about money, work, success. So after many years of that
kind of environment, I got tired of it and decided to search for something different, like volunteering.
•Overall many people have mental issues here - you can see with your own eyes how mentally not well some are. So he learned to not
be so judgmental. For him however that is a positive experience.
•I have been a volunteer here for about 3 months now and I am spending 3h per day at the Cafe.
•We always meet at 9am, all the employees and the volunteers, we have breakfast together,
•and sometimes afterwards we sing songs as well to cheer ourselves up.
•It makes me more open minded. It brings me a lot of joy to do the creative stuff, working with my hands is calming my brain, I can relax
that way.
Observation
We wanted to learn important things about the social and
collaborative components of the workplace by focusing on studying
the environment and communication between people.
In this observation phase, we mostly use two strategies:
•Atmospheric observation: This method focuses on observing the
general attitude and situation at work. We pay close attention to
details like lighting, furniture placement, and general aesthetics
since they have a big influence on how comfortable a workspace is.
•Interpersonal Dynamics: We attentively watch interactions
between people in addition to watching the physical world. This
covers both verbal and nonverbal communication, teamwork, and
casual interactions. Our objective is to learn more about
interpersonal interactions' possible pain sites, communication
styles, and patterns of collaboration.
Using this method, we may find ways to improve teamwork,
interaction, and overall workplace happiness and possible relations
with rebranding the existing website.
Object-Oriented User
Experience
In order to divide complicated systems or applications into smaller,
easier-to-manage components or objects, we adopted OOUX. Button,
form, menu, and data item objects are examples of these objects,
which represent actual things or digital components that users may
interact with. Designers may produce a better organized and
consistent user experience by recognizing and specifying these items.
We were able to create interfaces that were more user-friendly and
intuitive because to our design process and approach.
User Persona
We (the designers and developers)
designed it in order to get a greater
knowledge of and empathy for the
audience we were targeting. This
Persona includes crucial features,
habits, requirements, and needs of
various user groups, allowing us to
make design decisions that are not
only better informed but also based on
the viewpoints of the users.
Object-Oriented User Experience
From the perspective of a developer,
the phase of project development
that is most crucial and well-
structured is the generation of an
extensive list of requirements. This
approach encourages clear
communication, making sure all
participants have a shared
knowledge of the project's goals and
preventing any potential
misunderstandings. Prioritizing
needs enables us to concentrate on
critical elements, and specific
requirements act as the cornerstone
of quality assurance, enabling
thorough testing to confirm respect
to established standards. In the end,
this methodical approach speeds up
development, reduces risks, and
produces a finished product.
Mood board, List of Values and
Sketches
We developed our mood board based on the observations and the information from the
interviews using what we learnt from the interviews as well as from the OOUX conference. In
order to prevent losing the concept of the café Parasolens organization, we also recorded all
the values that we discovered to be important to the project and followed them during our
sketching process.
Lo-Fi, Mid-Fi and Hi-Fi
We developed every kind of wireframing, starting with low-fidelity and progressing to high-fidelity. We quickly advanced to the coding state
after testing all of our classmate prototypes.
Coding
With the aid of Git hub, the HTML, CSS, and JS on our website came to life. The drop-down menu and all of the scrollbar were made by me. We
end up with a clean, user-friendly and well functional digital solution
