Brewing better survey experience for Café employees

Improving response rates for internal surveys at an global coffee chain.

Project Overview

Getting busy store employees to response internal feedback surveys during shifts is challenging.

For a global coffee chain, scalability and market testing is crucial for launching innovations across thousands of stores. However, with only a 5% response rate, the team struggled to make convincing decisions. Our team collaborated with the global coffee chain to investigate barriers and identify design opportunities. Through rigorous exploratory and evaluative research, we found that barriers went far beyond survey design, revealing that the survey experience itself was one of the least concerns.

Key Research Questions

- Why is the survey response so low? - What can we do to increase it?

Project outcome

Developed an employee engagement framework and strategies for immediate, mid-term, and long-term implementation.

We tested strategies with 300 participants from 40 stores across 4 regions of America, achieving a 55%+ boost in survey participation. We also delivered a store employee engagement framework adaptable to broader users.

The reason why I include this project

This project demonstrates my ability to conduct comprehensive research combining both qualitative and quantitative methods, as well as generative and evaluative research. It was also one of the few opportunities to test at a large scale.

My Role

Design Strategist & Researcher

The Team

Samantha Chandra - Design Strategist & Researcher

Roger Hong - UI/UX Designer

Khush Tawar - UI/UX Designer

industry

Retail

Food & Beverage

Food & Beverage

Design attributes

B2E

Design Strategy

Concept Development

Skills

Generative and evaluative research · Analysis and synthesis Comparative testing · Stakeholder workshop facilitation · Storytelling · Ecosystem mapping · Persona development · Journey mapping ·

tools

Figjam, Figma, Microsoft Excel, Qualtrics

timeline

Jan - May 2025 (12 weeks, part-time)