Starbucks Pay to Skip the Line

Happy Tuesday!

As a treat, I sometimes order coffee from Starbucks to kick my day off with a burst of sugar and caffeine. There’s better coffee out there, but it’s ubiquitous and consistent.

I pretty much only order on my phone ahead of time now, and I try to get my coffee earlier in the morning to avoid the big pre-work rush.

This presents an interesting opportunity.

What if there was an option to pay an extra fee to skip the line and have staff make your drink immediately? There are a lot of unknowns here (what if two people pay for this at once? How much is too much to charge? How does this impact order sequencing with internal tools?), but given how much some people value time, this feature would get used.

The screenshot above was my first pass at designing a solution but I realized two things:

1. The illustration didn’t add much

2. It didn’t reflect what would happen to everyone ahead of you in line

So I made some revisions and here’s where we landed:

Ah yes, much better.

Now you can see the faces of the people who’s lives you are interrupting. Perfect. Obviously this version would never get implemented, but there is probably some sort of priority access experience I could see happening one day.

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