85C Bakery Cafe

My service dog and I are regulars at this bakery! We come every 1-2 weeks and have been for months! It’s my favourite bakery in San Antonio. Everyone is always pleasant, polite, and kind. The app has worked fine for me thus far (knock on wood). Only 1 time was it having issues logging me in about 2 weeks ago. Seemed like a bug. I was however able to open it when I arrived to the bakery thankfully to get my points. I have not tried ordering on the app, I prefer to pick my pastries myself. I’ve only used the app to scan in store for my points, or use my receipt to get my points if I forgot to scan.

I just got the app and already I’m a little frustrated, though I will update this review if it changes. The main issue is this, from what I can tell, you can only look at the menu by clicking “order” and clicking the location. The problem is, there’s only one location near me and it’s not doing online orders, so I can’t even look at the menu on the app. Which means one of two things, either the app is poorly designed to only let people view the menu if they’re placing an order (which is ridiculous, sometimes people just want to see what’s on the menu), or the menu is somewhere on the app and after clicking around for 5-10 minutes I can’t find it (in which case the app is poorly organized, as the “view menu” function should be one of the first available options when opening a food/drink app). Yes, I could google the menu which is what I ended up doing, but it’s very silly to have an app and then for people to still have to go to a different app to look up something that is a common basic function in most other food/drink apps. I absolutely LOVE this bakery. I have driven an hour and a half to the next city just to go there. I was thrilled when they opened a new location less than 15 minutes away from me. But as someone who uses a lot of apps for food and drink places, this is such a silly oversight to find. It would have been better to copy another app’s design. If there is a way to access the menu on the app without ordering please let me know, but it really shouldn’t take a scavenger hunt to find. I am young with no visual impairments and fairly tech savvy, so I can usually work around inconvenient app or website designs. But for customers who are older, have sight related disabilities, or who are unfamiliar with or uncomfortable with technology, designs like this actively make it harder for those customers to interact which will commonly lead to either the loss of a potential customer, or a stressful interaction for the staff working who have to deal with customer complaints.

For a wonderful food & beverage company, it is so disheartening to see the cause of its downfall being an app that only needed rearrangements and minor updates. I don’t know which company shareholder or major spokesperson decided an entirely new rework needed to be done, but it was clearly a misguided and/or rushed job. I used to be a VIP and would visit 85°C whenever I could; nowadays, I don’t buy unless I truly miss the drinks and food. This company is lucky that no other major company thought to strike up a challenge in the same field. Your programmers were either entirely incompetent or more than overworked in a time crunch, your decision makers pushed out a product that turned off a major part of your target audience, and many don’t have an incentive to shop at 85°C anymore because of how awful the app is. Please rework the app again with more time allocated to your programmers—WITH better programmers—all while keeping your audience in mind.