Sprint with Beer

Learn how design thinking helps us to redesign the beer buying experience for beer enthusiasts

Overview

Technology brings innovation to our lives. But do we always adopt it easily? Why are some technologies abandoned? Today the innovation should not be considered only as a technical invention but more as a human experience while using this invention. This approach is called Design Thinking. With Design Thinking, I and Daniel Keller are on a journey to redesign the beer buying experience executing in sprint mode.

Goals

The aim is to experience the stages of applied design thinking and immerse yourselves into the user's preferences of beers and create innovative solutions with the help of design thinking. 

Role

UX Designer

Area

Design Thinking, User Research, Wireframing, Prototyping

Team

Ananya Pandya, 
Daniel Keller

Duration

June - July 2020

Empathize

Kicking off with the brainstorming session to formulate a selection of questions and designing a protocol for the coming interview sessions.

The main challenge was to formulate questions in an open-minded way that will yield answers as insightful as possible. The focus during the interview should not only be to dig deep into someone's routine but also to gather a broad understanding of which problems arise.

Qualitative Interviews

During the initial discovery phase, we interviewed extreme user groups, one user group who are novice - who are finding the right taste of the beer, and another group who are experts - they already know what type of beer and taste they prefer to have.

• How do you decide what type of beer you would like to buy?
  "Over certain years, I have developed the taste of beer and now I know what type of beer/IPAs that I need to buy and I stick to certain brands. Additionally, I am fond of where the beer comes from. "
  Michael 39 yrs, Beer Enthusiast

• What kind of beer preferences do you have? 
  "I started exploring beer tasting experiences, so over time I try different kinds of flavor, different brands to broaden the horizon in order to find the right taste of the beer."
  Joel 27 yrs, Beer Novice

Define

It's time to put together the information that we have gathered during the Empathise stage. Firstly we will analyze the observations and synthesize them in order to define the core problems and try to define the problem as a problem statement in a human-centered manner.

Interpretation & Affinity Diagramming

Later, we clustered all our notes from the empathize stage into an affinity diagram. This method is an exciting way to organize your data after it's collected into patterns, insights, and digestible tidbits. The end goal is to come up with a visual representation of the user's point of view by categorising into Who, What, and Insights.

Insights are generated from Empathise stage and grouped them by user

It's important that you remember to sum up the major insights, user needs, pain points, etc,. Once we have done that we can proceed with formulating the problem statements.

Problem Statement - How might we?

Constructing how-might-we questions generates creative solutions while keeping the group focused on the right problems to solve. We want to find the right problem that can generate lots of creative ideas and eventually finding the right solution.

Here are some of How might we questions that were generated at the end of process:

• How might we help Rosa to find the right beer?
• How might we help Joel to find new beers/IPA so that he does not have to go to a pub or brewery?
• How might we help Jona to find special beers/IPAs at affordable prices?

We will use this problem statement as a reference for the next stage, i.e Ideate where we will brainstorm different solutions in order to design things right. 

Ideate

Worst possible idea

The worst possible idea is a design thinking technique where team members seek the worst solutions in the ideation process. 

This process does not limit the users to hold back the ideas that make them look silly or think that they don’t generate good ideas. Instead, the goal is to produce the silliest, craziest ideas, which surprisingly led to some silly but useful insights. We each wrote down features and ideas for a medium or a subdomain.

Few of the worst possible ideas that we wrote down on sticky notes

Putting everything together

Our goal is to bring this knowledge to the user and offer guidance to discover and buy beer they didn’t know existed. The medium that made the most sense was an app, so with this in mind we thought about all the possible things that would be in this app, like features, content, and events.

Ideas and the direction where the multiple solutions can be built

Prototype

Information Architecture

We made this structure according to our ideas and sketches. We defined the different sections and the content they will have, the dashboard might have a summary of all sections. 

The features are grouped together under each section and navigation provided represents the IA

Wireframes

We took 15 minutes time to sketch down some ideas as a low-fi wireframe, this set the foundation for the features in the app.

Sketches using pen and paper

The above wireframes are created using pen and paper. The goal is to generate solutions for the features according to information architecture. Later, we designed a rough wireframe in Figma and refined it later with more details and colors.

Low-Fi Mockups created in Figma

Hi-Fidelity Mockups

We designed a rough wireframe in Figma and refined it later with more details and colors. The start page acts as a summary of all sections, which include a leveling system, a map, events, and featured beers. Flavor preferences are saved in the user’s profile, which can be filtered on the beer discovery page. The leveling system counts beers you’ve ordered, which adds a layer of gamification to the app.

DASHBOARD

Summary of all sections to provide easy navigation on the home screen

DISCOVER

Explore the beer map to choose different breweries, and choose your flavor, to manage your preferences

EVENTS

Keep track of upcoming beer events and sync in your personal calendar

USER PROFILE

Overview of their profile containing a favorite beer, rewards achieved, and flavour preferences

Key Takeaways

Design thinking is essentially a problem-solving approach which can be applied to a various different industry, which involves assessing known aspects of a problem and identifying the more ambiguous factors that contribute to the conditions of the beer buying experience.

Using the "Worst Possible Ideation" technique, I experienced outside the box thinking, as to attempt to develop new ways of thinking that do not abide by the common approach, improvising the beer buying experience, and innovating the solution.

"Sprint with Beer" offers us a means of digging that bit deeper to uncover ways of improving the user experience with an applied design thinking approach.

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Get in touch for opportunities or just to say hi!