Workflows

In my time conducting the contextual inquiry, I had three main themes in the observations that stood out regarding the workflow. Included in the chart below are what I observed of the actual consumer flow, as well as the workstations and their assigned tasks on the top, and the bottom chart is a general recommendation of how the design might be better streamlined.

Theme 1: Station Bottlenecks

For the employee stations, these stations were more or less effective in assigning expectations; however, each station was not equally divided in their tasks, with the one register station being responsible for all of the following tasks: order taking, pastry delivery, serving drip coffee, tea brewing, cold brew delivery, pour over making and espresso cup setup. Other stations were: 2. Espresso shot pulling (all just one station), and then 3. drink steaming, drink calling, and in-house drink and food delivery (to the table). On weekends, there is an additional 4th station for food and drink delivery. This presented a bottleneck in the service experience as the register station was often performing many tasks, and the other stations were often held up by the speed of the register station, which frequently meant the register station was performing 2 or 3 tasks while the other stations waited. Not all the orders taken would even yield an espresso drink either, with many orders consisting of food, drip coffee, cold brew, and/or just pastries. This meant the register person would often help 2 or 3 people, and perform 4-6 tasks before other stations would be needed.

Theme 2: Consumer Confusion

Another observation during the contextual inquiry was consumer confusion in the ordering portion of interactions. Throughout the observation, I noticed employees needed to guide consumers through the café design, where to pick up drinks, where to drop off their dishes, where to get straws and lids for their ordered drinks, and where the menu was while ordering at the cash register. This led to the staff making about 6-8 directive or informational statements to consumers while performing other tasks, and staff members mentioned it as one of the more annoying factors of their job. Although they reported these statements did not directly impact service times, employees mentioned it as a factor in slowing down their ability to focus on service, and the consistent pauses to address customer questions or address customers wrongly guessed the answers greatly affected their mood. From my observations, consumer confusion did contribute to congestion in the service area.

Theme 3: Café Identity

During the interviews with the staff, one topic of discussion was that a 10-15 minute wait to order at a food establishment, like a popular bagel spot or at Chipotle, would not be unreasonable on the weekend; however, a 10-15 minute wait for coffee is a fairly long time. This brought up questions the bar manager and lead barista had about the identity of Solid State Coffee: Are they a café, or are they a coffee shop?

This was then further reflected in their barista training, in which not much attention was spent on discussing food drop-off or pick-up with the baristas. When discussing training, drop-off procedures, and coffee delivery with the manager, there was no uniform method for drop-off, and no scripts were utilized for uniformity among staff members. This was also further confusing due to the variety of procedures used by baristas to manage drink delivery depending on their level of staffing, with drink running getting cut if they were short-staffed on a given day.

This tended to contribute to consumer confusion, as regular customers would more often ask where they should expect their drink, and casual customers more often expressed confusion that during previous visits their drinks were delivered to the table.

Bringing up some of the wait time data with the employees, the bar manager suggested that one of the longest portions of consumer interactions at the register was the food orders. Food orders bring in more money than the coffee orders, but do tend to take longer to communicate. Some register data suggested food sales increased dramatically over the weekends, and this would elongate the wait times greatly. This further confirmed the idea of a second register or a coffee-only register, in order to streamline coffee service while still maintaining the food menu.