IceTime

Isn't it annoying? You just want to buy an ice cream but the three meter long queue in front of the parlor makes you lose your desire...

Thanks to IceTime, this is now a thing of the past. Due to the app visitors get an earlier look at the daily changing ice cream assortment. So they can decide which flavor they're in the mood for before they even get in line.

EisZeit is an app that allows ice cream parlors to quickly and easily make their current assortment available online so that customers can view it before visiting the ice cream parlor. This makes it easy to avoid long queues.

Ice cream makers can also easily view customer orders received and prepare them, depending on the order time and the customer's distance from the ice cream parlor.

Customers can search for ice cream parlors using the ice cream parlor finder or pre-order their ice cream at their favorite ice cream parlor next door using access. This prevents you from having to wait in line for a long time before buying.

Research & Empathize

After we had decided on a topic, we began with further research. In addition to conventional online research, we used various methods to gain new insights and information.

For example, we gained input by cultural probes, interviews, secondary research and trying our hands at making ice cream ourselves.

Ideation & Synthesis

After gaining a lot of input we tried to organize our knowledge by creating personas, empathy maps, storyboards, value proposition canvas, function- and technology matrix, …

We then reopened our field and started brainstorming again to filter out the features we needed to solve our target audience's problems. We started with a large number of functions that we could incorporate into our application, then sorted them out using various methods and criteria, and in the end arrived at our main functions, which we were actually able to implement in terms of time: providing an online view of the product range and thus ensuring online pre-orders. We kept other functions in mind, such as reordering ingredients or statistics on the most popular flavors of the individual ice cream shops, in case we were faster than expected.

We also created an overview of different devices that our users could use. Google Glasses, smartphones, iPads, screens,... among others, played a role here. In the end, we decided to use it on the smartphone for the customer and on the iPad for the Ice Creamist. Smartphone because almost everyone always carries one with them and iPad because they are handier than computer screens and yet large enough to still see the information from a greater distance.

Scribbles & Wireframes

To implement the knowledge we had acquired, we first started with sketches, thoughts on how our app could look like.

After we were satisfied with these, we started to digitally implement our favorite sketch, first as a wireframe, later as a visual prototype.

Finally, we linked the resulting screens together, so that you can click through them as in a real app.

Ideation & Prototyping