Blenz Coffee

The problem

Blenz Coffee’s mobile app was launched quickly in response to a drop in sales during the COVID-19 pandemic. It shipped with basic ordering functionality, but little attention to usability, visual polish, or how customers actually wanted to interact with it.

Our team’s job was to turn that rushed release into an app that matched what customers expected from a modern coffee-ordering experience, and from Blenz’s own brand.

Research

We approached the redesign through three research threads:

• Stakeholder interviews with Blenz management, to understand the business problem behind the rushed launch
• Interviews with users of competing coffee-ordering apps, for comparison
• Usability walkthroughs of the original Blenz app itself, watching where people got stuck

Findings & evaluation

Two rounds of evaluation shaped what we prioritized: a heuristic evaluation the team ran against standard usability heuristics, and a broader usability pass covering navigation, interface, intuitiveness, and aesthetics.

A separate usability pass, drawn from interviews and walkthroughs of the original app, grouped further issues by category:

User journey

Home → Location → Customization → Checkout

We mapped the redesign around four stages of the ordering journey. The checkout step and the customization step share a single screen in the prototype — there’s no separate order-confirmation screen among the project files.

1. 

   Home

   Points balance, popular items, and quick access to ordering.

2. 

   Location

   Store search and nearby pickup locations.

3. 

   Customization

   Browsing the menu — drink of the day, hot beverages, and food.

4. 

   Checkout

   Size, add-ins, and price, with checkout on the same screen.

   This screen also handles item personalization — the prototype does not include a separate checkout-confirmation screen.

Mapping the flow

Before the four screens above existed, we mapped the full ordering flow end-to-end — then revised it once. The team’s own notes on the revised diagram describe linearizing the flow: removing an upfront choice between “pickup” and “order now,” and instead setting pickup time at the end of the process.

Design response

Three changes carried the redesign, responding directly to the findings above:

• UI redesign — an updated colour palette, layout, and typography, responding to the “plain and dated interface” and “aesthetic and minimalist design” findings.
• Loyalty integration — a points balance and redeemable rewards, visible on the Home screen above, to give customers a reason to return.
• Onboarding experience — a simple first-run walkthrough for new users, responding to the original app’s missing help option for first-time users.

Testing & validation

We had participants use both the original app and the redesigned prototype, then compared them on navigation, system feedback, and satisfaction — the same three areas our earlier heuristic and usability evaluations had flagged as weak. Task success rate, time-on-task, and pre/post-test questionnaires were how we measured it. The redesign came out ahead on all three; we didn’t carry exact figures forward from the coursework, but the direction was consistent across every participant.

Prototype

Reflection

The clearest habit Blenz left me with was tracing each design decision back to a specific finding rather than a general sense that the app needed to improve — linearizing the ordering flow so pickup time moved to the end instead of gating the start, or building the onboarding walkthrough directly in response to first-time users having no help option. Being able to point at a screen and name the finding behind it is what I took most from this project, alongside a stronger command of Figma and a foundation in design research techniques — debrief recall, pre/post questionnaires — that are now standard tools in how I work.