Happy International Coffee Day
As per Wikipedia:
International Coffee Day (1 October) is an occasion that is used to promote and celebrate coffee as a beverage, with events now occurring in places across the world. The first official date was 1 October 2015, as agreed by then International Coffee Organization and was launched in Milan. This day is also used to promote fair trade coffee and to raise awareness for the plight of the coffee growers. On this day, many businesses offer free or discounted cups of coffee. Some businesses share coupons and special deals with their loyal followers via social networking. Some greeting card companies sell National Coffee Day greeting cards as well as free e-cards.
To be honest, we didn't know this day formally existed up until yesterday. Nevertheless we appreciate the attention to not only coffee as a drink but also to coffee growers, farmers around the globe and the increasing awareness.
Coffee fact
Brewed coffee has more caffeine than espresso per serving
What we've been up to
Last 4 weeks have been rich, super rich in tasks and integrations. I was afraid our CTO will burn out as we've had so many insights from user and roaster interviews that our backlog of tasks grew like crazy. I'm going to briefly cover the insights and following updates here.
Adding a new coffee item
We've noticed some users adding coffee items without prior fact-checking and just providing the info they see fit, which led to increased content managers' work on checking and amending new items. Hence the decision to hide the additional fields in the Add a coffee section.
As you see we ask for 3 mandatory fields only now. The rest will be updated by our content managers. What this brings is more items added and better quality since our content managers fact check everything.
And should you want to add full info, you can always do that ❤️
A real coffee expert joining the team
No kidding, we have been doing everything based on what we could read online up until this point. Now we have a real human being who is super smart and knows everything specialty coffee. The downside is he brought a lot of comments and we had to implement a lot of updates in the website like adding Q Grading, introducing new process methods, etc. and there's a lot more to come like advanced / expert coffee reviews, brewing method selection, roast date indication and so on. We kind of don't know if we are glad he joined the team 😆 But to be honest, we've already felt the difference and are super glad to have him on the team!
Major design overhaul coming soon
Yeah, you heard us right — we have an amazing designer working on full website redesign as we speak! Stay tuned to see our freshly brewed design!
User, roaster interviews and UX-tests
Oh this was a rollercoaster of emotions. We've carried out 30+ user interviews and UX-tests with users and roasters to get their insights, see how they understand Coffeeopia, see how they use the product and ask for their advice. Not that you'll be interested, but we got to know a lot about us:
- users simply didn't see the search field. yeah, the one right on the top
- adding coffee was mixed up with reviewing coffee
- people would have to go through too many steps until the famous 'aha moment'
- BUT when they got to that aha moment, they were hooked and we saw some amazingly deep and thoughtful usage from them
- misleading home page design, hence the design overhaul coming soon
- and a lot lot more
Based on feedback above we have implemented a series of miscellaneous features already: ability to remove your review, optimized mobile web version, fixed a lot of bugs.
What this helped us realize is we're just starting out, we are super excited about the journey ahead and there are a lot of amazing things coming soon!
Celebration time 🎉
It's International Coffee Day today, but on top of that this day is special for several reasons:
- we've just hit 100 days since the very first line of code
- to date we have 130+ roasters, 500+ coffee items and 40+ users some of which are very engaged
- we've received several amazing comments about Coffeeopia and this motivates us to do more
Stay tuned for more updates!