Matcha Doing?
Designing a new wholesale purchasing feature for Matcha Doing?'s self-service kiosk chatbot
Project Info
My Role:
Ideate conversational flow for the chatbot and align with customer's expected interaction flow
Design Matcha Doing's brand guidelines, logo, and mascot chatbot avatar
Create UI assets for the chatbot application that uphold Matcha Doing's branding and chatbot personality
Design Goals:
Design a new 0-to-1 wholesale purchasing feature for Matcha Doing's self-ordering kiosk chatbot
Ensure the new feature integrates with existing multimodality (voice input and visual display)
Create a chatbot personality that customers will find helpful and happy to interact with
Show Details
Overview
Matcha Doing?: Easy, quick, and powerful site-building for digital exhibits
Matcha Doing? is a self-service kiosk at the entrance of a specialty matcha and Japanese tea shop. It features multimodal interactions (i.e., a combination of both voice user interface (VUI) and visual screen-based interfaces) that lets customers order drinks, browse the menu, pay, and manage their membership without no staff needed.
Our team designed a new wholesale purchasing feature for the Matcha Doing? self-service kiosk. The new wholesale feature extends Matcha Doing?'s current functionality to now include physical matcha product purchasing, fulfillment, and delivery—all done directly from the existing self-service kiosk.
Problem
Omeka S’s intimidating interfaces and complex navigation scare away new & beginner users
Users believe it takes too much time and effort to build a website on Omeka in comparison to other site-builder platforms.
Beginner users are intimidated by the technical vocabulary and complex task flow needed to operate Omeka S.
How might we reduce the technical obstacles and navigational friction users face while trying to build a website in order to increase user retention rates on Omeka S?
Process & Ideation
From 0-to-1: Our Bot Design Approach
Building for Multimodal Integration
Matcha Doing?'s conversational bot employs 3 types of modalities for interaction including:
Is a conversational bot the best fit?
To determine whether a conversational bot is the 'best fit' for ordering wholesale products at a kiosk, our team took Google's "Is Conversation the Right Approach" quiz. Matcha Doing?'s new feature may not be a necessity at first, but it can become a more interactive and inclusive design as a conversational interface.
Considering the smaller range of products Matcha Doing? offers, it's intuitive and brief to use conversation as the task tool. Our conversational product adds in mic and voice input functionality, making the purchasing and ordering process less reliant on vision and physical touch. Adding in these new VUI modalities makes Matcha Doing? more accessible for a wider audience (including users who are temporarily or permanently disabled).
Final Design Mockups
Matcha Doing?
The Roosting Trees are a set of artificial trees designed to mimic crows’ natural roosting habitat, but made compatible for being placed on city building rooftops. Standing at about 26-39 feet tall, the Roosting Trees mimic crows’ ideal tree height and size, and they use a special mounting base for wind & weather resistance. Previous iterations of RoostTop imagined planting real trees on rooftops, but the roots, soil, and overall maintenance of such real trees would likely be incompatible with the structural integrity of many buildings. In addition, I ideated a 3-layered material structure that could offer structure, warmth, and self-cleaning to make the Roosting Trees even more attractive to roosting crows.
Final Prototype
Matcha Doing?:
Matcha Wholesale-Purchasing Conversational Bot
`Try out the interactive prototype! 😉
Takeaways & Reflections
My First Bot-Building Experience — This was my first time designing the user experience for a conversational chatbot. Although I have used some LLM-powered chatbots in the past, it's not an area I started this project with a lot of expertise in. However, throughout this project and Professor Opper's academic course, I was able to learn about all the different factors a UX Designer needs to consider when designing a chatbot. For example, with Matcha Doing?, I worked especially hard on analyzing and coming up with the common utterances a user would likely say to prompt the chatbot for various needs (e.g. "buy", "order", "purchase", and "get" were classified as important keywords likely to be associated with an utterance requesting to start a purchase order).
Not every experience is a good fit for conversation! — While working on Matcha Doing?, my team and I had to think a lot about whether our product and experience even needed a conversational experience / chatbot in the first place! Prior, I would have thought that any and every experience should have a conversational option where users could interact with a product by speaking and listening to it, as a means for expanding accessibility to users who have vision difficulties. However, although accessibility is a great reason to offer conversation, it's not the only factor that determines whether a product should allow for conversation. For example, factors such as whether the user's vision or touch abilities are likely to be preoccupied during the interaction, or if it's a type of interaction where typing it out is difficult compared to speaking it out, are also great reasons for why a product should offer conversational options. And as described earlier, placing matcha orders at Matcha Doing? is an experience that fits perfectly as well!
Thank you to my team members: Ha, Maanya, and Shriya for collaborating with me on this project; and to Professor Michael Opper for guiding us with your feedback to make Matcha Doing? the best matcha-ordering chatbot it can be! :)