Costa Coffee: In-store digital transformation/UX planning

Re-imagining Costa’s in-store digital experience.

Costa Coffee was transitioning its in-store point-of-sale materials from a heavily print-based experience to a new, dynamic, digitally driven experience powered by ITG’s Storyteq software solution.

Heading up the strategy team at ITG, and working closely with ITG Innovation and UX teams, my role was to show how in-store digital boards and menus could deliver this new experience while meeting commercial and personalisation goals.

The objective

Costa’s old digital screens were based on their print materials and didn’t have the ability to inspire customers, flex to Costa’s commercial challenges (eg promote high margin products at the right time) or cope with rapid changes in content fed by ITG’s Storyteq solution.

Our brief was to transform the digital experience in order to meet these multiple challenges, integrate with the wider customer journey and enable a test plan that would prove the revenue-driving abilities of digital POS.

The solution

I followed the ITG CX designing thinking framework to gather user insight, map the journey and develop a design system that could meet all objectives and future-proof Costa’s in-store experience.

User insight

I gathered a panel of Costa customers across a range of different personas and missions in order to test past and future boards. We gave them tasks to complete, such as visiting Costa stores with a particular mission and recording their impressions according to a set of standard questions.

I also conducted virtual focus groups to put various Costa and competitor boards in front of our participants and understand their feelings in depth.

Industry inspiration

Working with our research team, we carried out competitor missions across brands such as Starbucks, McDonalds, Pret, Leon and Itsu to understand where the industry was moving and how different customer-journeys are used for different goals.

Journey mapping

I consolidated all of our insight into a customer report and a detailed set of journey maps that outlined the role of each digital touchpoint.

UX design

Working with a UX designer, I created a set of simple but highly impactful templates that represented best-in-class digital design and could also flex to challenges such as day parting, temperature changes, rapid product promotion and demotion and the creation at scale of multiple variants for Costa’s across the country.

User acceptance testing

I took variants of our boards into the ITG testing centre at Fort Dunlop and took our customer panel through different variations, assessing accessibility, quality, and ability to inspire multiple customer missions.

Launch and test plan

Example of MVP designs: flexible, multi-purpose, image-led, inspirational

The UAT helped us create a final version of the designs for Costa to take forward to launch and live testing in a set of 50 Costa test stores. We launched our MVP version in order to create an impact assessment (ie revenue was not affected by the switch to the new boards) then outlined an ongoing testing programme to show how the boards might influence the sale of premium and seasonal products, how they might promote food vs drink and how they might promote value items.

Results

Our new digital experience helped to increase sales of Costa’s premium products by 5% in the first month of launch, and maintained sales across all other ranges. Costa is in the process of rolling out an ongoing testing plan to develop the design further according to testing results.