Tea Link

Background

Nowadays, Chinese bubble tea industry has gone through a process of rapidly growing. While the market becomes larger, both consumers and merchants are facing more problems. In this course, we aimed to find a specific problem in the industry and solve it by technology.

Research

To find the problem, we carried out a comprehensive research on the bubble tea industry. We conducted field research in the CBD of Hangzhou, where many bubble tea shops locate in. We also carried out a questionnaire survey among bubble tea consumers. Additionally, we interviewed several consumers as well as a bubble tea shop merchant near our campus.

Problem

After research, we found that a large portion of bubble tea consumers show uncertainty when they face an unfamiliar product, which is harmful to the merchants to promote new products. Even though the merchants use various advertisement, these ads might be misleading and make the experience of trying new products worse.

Solution

Inspired by the knowledge graph, which uses a graph-structured model to integrate data, we came up with the idea of presenting all kinds of bubble tea products using topology. The weight of the edges in the graph bases on the similarity in taste between two particular products. Consequently, when users choose a kind of bubble tea, the graph can present all the similar products to help the users to learn the taste of the chosen one. In addition, it can also help consumers to find out more products by choosing their favorite bubble tea. Ideally, the graph will be powered by the big data of users’ consumption habits and users’ ratings to the “similarity relationship”.

Implementation

We collected up to 40 bubble tea products from 5 popular bubble tea brands. Then, we simulated the data of similarity to generate the graph. We developed the prototype in a mini app platform provided by a commonly used Chinese payment app “AliPay”.