Online Card Management
About Starbucks
Starbucks Corporation is an American multinational chain of coffeehouses and roastery reserves headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It was founded in 1971 by Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker at Seattle's Pike Place Market initially as a coffee bean wholesaler. Starbucks was converted into a coffee shop serving espresso-based drinks under the ownership of Howard Schultz, who was chief executive officer from 1986 to 2000 and led the aggressive expansion of the franchise across the West Coast of the United States. As of November 2022, the company had 35,711 stores in 80 countries, 15,873 of which were located in the United States. Of Starbucks' U.S.-based stores, over 8,900 are company-operated, while the remainder are licensed. It is currently the world's largest coffeehouse chain. The company is ranked 120th on the Fortune 500 and 303rd on the Forbes Global 2000, as of 2022. The rise of the second wave of coffee culture is generally attributed to Starbucks, which introduced a wider variety of coffee experiences. Starbucks serves hot and cold drinks, whole-bean coffee, micro-ground instant coffee, espresso, caffe latte, full and loose-leaf teas, juices, Frappuccino beverages, pastries, and snacks. Some offerings are seasonal or specific to the locality of the store. Depending on the country, most locations provide free Wi-Fi Internet access. The company has been subject to multiple controversies related to its business practices. Conversely, its franchise has commanded substantial brand loyalty, market share, and company value.
Project Overview
In conjunction with a major website overhaul, Starbucks was redesigning their Card features to address user dissatisfaction and confusion with managing their Starbucks cards. Customers called the call center frequently to complete tasks that could easily be completed online, such as reloading their Card, checking their Card balance, purchasing a new card or transferring the balance from one card to another. Our goal was to drive users to the website to get them to complete these tasks.
I assisted the Sr. Information Architect on this project by expanding on her preliminary Balsamiq prototypes and building out the features we identified with the business team. I went through several iterations of the requested features, and we utilized these iterations during usability studies. In addition, I was able to make recommendations about other areas of the site that would need to be changed in conjunction with the new features.
Outcomes
User feedback from the usability studies was extremely positive, and we were able to secure buy-in from the business team once they saw the results of the usability studies.
Takeaways
It's fairly impressive how we were able to overhaul this area of the website in a short amount of time, particularly given our emphasis on conducting usability sessions with paper prototypes. While my time on this contract was short (2 months), it was a particularly rewarding project because it allowed me an opportunity to work with a global brand. I think the most engaging aspect of this project was addressing some user login issues. Initially when Starbucks began an online management system, each card had to be associated with a unique ID. Users had been allowed to create accounts for each card using either a username or an email address, which created a lot of headache for them in managing their cards. One of the goals had been to allow users to choose a single unique ID (either email or username) and to then consolidate the cards associated with their other accounts under one ID. Starbucks wanted to allow users the freedom to choose an email address or a username for their unique ID, which presented some challenges in designing a flow that would allow for either. I was able to solve that particular issue, which was a lot of fun to untangle!