Happiness is a tap away.

Bubble tea is a high-frequency, heavily customized category: the combinations of sugar level, ice level, and toppings are different for nearly every customer, and peak-hour lines plus the communication overhead of verbal ordering directly hurt both guest experience and store efficiency. Meanwhile, a brand that can only reach customers through third-party delivery platforms pays commissions of up to 30% — and never gets to keep its own member data. Gong cha therefore wanted its own loyalty system: a promotion channel it controlled, and a points accrual and redemption system that belonged to the brand.

The first step of Gong cha’s digital journey was actually the in-store Kiosk: labor is the single largest expense in franchise operations, and the Kiosk reduced peak-hour counter staffing from two people to one — directly improving franchisee margins. Once Kiosks were in place, franchisee and customer demand shifted toward a brand-owned App.

The core question: how do you let customers complete complex drink customization and reward redemption entirely on their own — and make that experience good enough to pull them from third-party platforms back to the brand’s own channel?

The App’s primary users are high-frequency bubble tea customers — young, mobile-first, with firmly established customization habits (sugar, ice, toppings), sensitive to loyalty rewards, and with little patience for lines. They don’t need to be taught how to use an ordering app — but the moment the customization options fail to match their verbal habits, or the reward rules feel confusing, they retreat to the counter or a third-party platform. The secondary stakeholders are franchisees: they care about peak-hour efficiency, member-data accumulation, and whether the reward mechanics actually drive repeat purchases.

One interview crystallized the need: a working mother of two who orders for the whole family after work — checking calories and allergens for the kids, customizing every cup differently, and feeling the pressure of the line building behind her while she negotiates it all with staff. For her, self-serve isn’t convenience; it’s relief.

Pre-design research — a ten-question survey across four stakeholder groups (franchise owners, store managers, frontline staff and customers) plus six 30-minute 1-on-1 interviews — converged on a few key insights:

• Users wanted an autonomous customization and redemption experience that didn’t depend on staff; 66% of customers preferred self-service over interacting with staff
• Users’ real concerns about digital ordering: whether the system could handle complex customization, data security, and the loss of human recommendations
• The competitive analysis covered three tiers — direct (Happy Lemon, Kung Fu Tea), indirect (Jamba, Yogurtland), and benchmark (Starbucks, McDonald’s): direct competitors already had their own apps, making digital ordering table stakes; the benchmarks proved that what actually drives repeat purchase is the combination of ordering convenience plus a closed reward loop

The most interesting benchmark finding came from Starbucks’ channel strategy: no kiosks in stores at all, App only — turning the phone in every customer’s pocket into a “kiosk you carry with you.” But that strategy rests on coffee’s daily frequency and deeply ingrained habits; bubble tea’s walk-in, grab-and-go pattern doesn’t share those conditions. Its real value was in making one thing clear: a benchmark’s channel strategy is a product of its category conditions and can’t simply be copied — the right path for Gong cha was App and Kiosk in parallel, sharing a single membership and points system.

Users’ biggest concern in research was whether complex customization could survive digitization — ordering verbally, you can say “less ice, light sugar, no boba, swap in coconut jelly,” and the interface had to decompose that natural-language flexibility into structured choices across sugar, ice, and toppings: losing no options, while never letting users get lost in them. The information architecture of the customization flow became the most heavily refined part of the entire App. Structure has a cost — flexibility: verbal edge cases like “half the boba, ice on the side” can never be fully enumerated, so we covered the vast majority of standard customizations and left extreme personalization to the counter.

With 66% of customers preferring self-service, the reward experience had to be equally self-serve: points accrue automatically with every order, balance and history are always visible, and redemption happens inside the ordering flow itself — never requiring customers to ask staff or present any proof. The result is a “spend → earn → redeem → spend again” loop, not a sign-up-and-forget gimmick.