Blueprint Games (Spring 2025)

Your Task

Today, you will assume the role of a Blueprint project team member. You and your team will work together to define project goals, deliverables, and features for a nonprofit, assuming you have ten weeks to implement your plan.

Don't worry — you won’t be writing any code today. Instead, your team will focus on understanding and discussing product needs, outlining key features, planning high-level user flows, and modeling your initial database needs.

✨ If you don't understand every part of the prompt, that's okay. Ask your team members (and E-Board) for help! This exercise is as much about your ability to collaborate as it is about your ability to work towards completing a technical task.

🥁 Drumroll… Introducing the nonprofit you’ll be working with today…

Penny Juice of America

Penny Juice of America is a family-owned, non-profit business founded in 2001, with over 40 years of experience in the beverage industry. They offer 100% blended fruit juice concentrates specifically designed for childcare centers, meeting FDA nutritional requirements. The concentrates are easy to prepare, cost-effective, and available in a variety of flavors, with free nationwide delivery and no minimum order beyond one case.

Despite their strong product line, they are facing a significant challenge in efficiently managing order fulfillment and delivery logistics, especially as demand grows nationwide. The current process involves handling individual orders manually, which has led to delays and inefficiencies in ensuring timely deliveries and meeting customer needs, impacting their service quality and customer satisfaction.

To address this, Penny Juice is considering a new model:

Childcare centers can place orders through an online portal.
The administrative team receives these orders and assigns them to local distributors or delivery partners.
Delivery partners indicate their availability for a given order, and the team sends them order details.
Once the order is dispatched, the team marks it as "In Progress" on the portal, and customers are notified.

The Goal

✨ Penny Juice's challenge is to create a more efficient platform that streamlines the process of connecting childcare centers with deliveries of juice concentrates. Consider the following questions:

How can we leverage technology to simplify the ordering and delivery process, eliminating unnecessary steps?
How can we improve the flow of information to ensure faster and more accurate order fulfillment?

The Users

Childcare Centers (ordering juice concentrates)
Delivery Partners (handling and delivering the juice concentrates)
Administrative Team (managing orders and tracking deliveries)

Upon successful delivery, the team marks the order as "Complete," ensuring tracking and communication for both customers and staff.

This new approach aims to streamline order processing, reduce delays, and improve customer satisfaction across the country.

Getting started

When Blueprint partners with a nonprofit, they describe the challenge they’re facing, and we’re free to decide how to tackle it. Today, you’re in Blueprint’s place. How you choose to approach this prompt is entirely up to you and your team. Just make sure you can provide solid justifications for your decisions. There’s no right answer—everything has tradeoffs. For this project you can assume that you have 14 weeks (1 semester to complete it).

Here are some questions to get you started.

What kind of system do you think would fit best? Is it an app, a website? Or is it something else entirely?
Consider the profile of a typical user. Are there any considerations that should be made when designing a new system for said user? How might these considerations affect the final deliverable?
What features would be most valuable to the nonprofit and its end-users?
How can you make sure it's feasible for your team to complete within the ten weeks?
What should you focus on? What might you have to sacrifice?

When you’re ready to get started, duplicate this Google Doc and share it with your team members. The doc contains a few tips on how to take notes.

Deliverables

🌟 You will not be asked to present your final deliverables. We are more interested in seeing how you go about understanding and breaking down the problem than any polished final result.

Document any thoughts, drawings, or features as you work! At the end, you will submit everything your team has come up with.

That said, we aren't looking to see a beautiful polished design doc — we're most interested in your process, so feel free to include in-progress work and notes, and don't fret about the formatting.

Your team will submit the design doc (created earlier) which can include any artifacts you create or use throughout this process. This can include:

User Stories
A List of Key Features
User Flow Diagrams - include screenshots if you make them in a separate software
Wireframes - include screenshots if you make them in a separate software
Database Schema - this should include the data you think is neccessary for the system to run
Application Programming Interface (API) Endpoints

Appedix

User Flow Diagram: A visual diagram that describes the steps a software system takes when a user performs performs certain actions. There can be multiple user flows, which might call for multiple diagrams or variations of diagrams. For example, say your website requires users to create an account and login. A user flow diagram for the login process would look something like this:

Each symbol means something different in a user flow diagram.

Ovals represent the start and end of a user flow
Rectangles represent actions that a user can take or actions that the system will perform
Rectangles represent decision points within the software

Database Schema:

Application Programming Interface (API):

Tips

Helpful process to go about designing apps

What features are most important?
What information/data you need to build those features?
How should this information/data be represented, and how much of that information is shown to users?
What is the flow each user takes in order to access and manipulate this information?
What would the screens look like to each of the users?

Understanding the end user

How can we build in a way that creates an app that is accessible, simple to use, and easy to understand?