What’s The Tea?

6 min readJun 6, 2021

Executive Summary

Problem Space

Over the past decade, tea has exploded in popularity with a steady 10% increase every year for a decade! With tea becoming more of a hot commodity, tea drinkers may be overjoyed that their favorite tea blends and flavors are more readily available than before. However, the vast majority of consumers are gleaning their tea-related information from the backs of grocery store tea boxes and the ethics, the origins and the ingredients aren’t always clear cut. Through our product, we hope to address these issues and inconsistencies with brand labelling and quality assurance.

Goal

The objective is to create a native mobile application that both novice and avid tea drinkers can access at the touch of a button, providing them with every possible piece of information they could possibly want in regards to their tea of choice. This information will include: Origin, Fair Trade Alliances, Certifications, Variety, caffeine content, etc.

Methodology

As a team, we collectively decided that, given the nature of our features, it was best to present our product in the form of a mobile application. We then concluded that our two potential partners would be Mountain Rose Herbs and Bigelow tea, creating business model canvases for both and constructing one for ourselves as well to get a better idea of what our product would entail.

Having decided on this, our next step was to conduct two rounds of user interviews with at least five participants each to determine whether or not our existing assumptions were valid. To do this, we built a discussion guide delineating various questions and follow up inquiries to be asked of our participants. We then created an affinity map to better categorise our results and understand in what ways and to what extent our user base shared a mental model.

With these insights we constructed our Persona, named ‘Daisy’ who provides us with a visual representation of our tea-loving target audience. Following that we collaborated to build a journey map together, outlining Daisy’s emotional experiences tackling her stressful schedule and how that impacts her choices as a tea drinker. This method outlines system touchpoints, pain points, highlights and opportunities that our persona experiences from the time she wakes up, to the time she goes to bed, offering us a personal glimpse into her daily life. We even embellished the map by including Daisy’s thoughts and quotes in order to better create a narrative.

Outcome

In leveraging these tools we came to the realization that tea drinkers emphasized their health and expressed a shared notion that their tea of choice was impacted by several social, environmental and emotional factors.

Hypothesis

With those realizations in mind, we hypothesized:

“Tea drinkers need a better way to access information about tea blends that assist with their current emotional state and wellbeing.”

Assumptions

Tea Drinkers are generally health conscious individuals who are proactive in their self — care.
Preferences change depending on the season as well as time of day.
Tea has the ability to enhance a person’s mood.
Consumers are concerned about the ethics, origin and quality assurance of their beverages.

Problem Space

“How might we provide potential tea drinkers with blends that suit their needs?”

RESEARCH PHASE

Goal of Research

To establish the needs of potential tea drinkers.

Affinity Map

We took everything we learned from our user interviews and plotted the data to help us find trends from everything we found. Below are some of the trends we’ve found.

Prefers journaling to unwind.
Associates tea with cultural roots, social functions and family gatherings.
Enjoys aesthetically pleasing teas that have edible glitter, flowers blooming or other exciting visuals.
Considers tea healthier than coffee and easier to make.
Avoids high fructose corn syrup, added sugars and sugary beverages in general when possible.
Believes that tea ware is an important addition to the overall experience of drinking tea.
Claims to be more invested in certain teas depending on her mood and frequency depending on how busy she is that day.
Prefers shopping for tea in person because she can see the selection and smell the different varieties.

Introducing Daisy

Daisy is a persona created by us to represent our entire target audience, as well as their collective goals, needs and pain points. She’s a young woman with an interest in tea and, as a graduate student in environmental studies, she has a passion for clean energy and saving the environment.

Referring back to Daisy’s persona will assist us moving forward in influencing our design solutions throughout our design process.

Revised Problem Statement

Tea drinkers are bombarded with too many options when it comes to buying their tea and want to make more ethical and environmentally friendly choices. They have their personalized preferences and health concerns to address, but often end up purchasing a less than ideal tea to meet these needs for the sake of convenience.

Daisy, a member of our target audience, is feeling worried since recently realizing that her favorite brand of tea sources out unethically. She reaps the health benefits offered by that brand but is struggling to find a suitable replacement on her own. Daisy wishes she could quickly purchase quality medical grade tea that aligns with her ethical and moral values.

“How might we assist Daisy in making health-conscious decisions while finding tea that aligns with her ethical and moral values?”

DESIGN PHASE

Mid Fidelity Prototype

Taking everything we gathered from our research we created a workable prototype based on the screens below.

Usability Testing Round 1

User’s found the first task difficult to complete due to the health icon being misleading.
Most users found the ‘mood’ icon to be easily identifiable, with the exception of only one user.
All users achieved rapid direct success with the third task, attributing their success to their familiarity with other social media applications.