I teamed up with another designer specialising in UI and branding to work on a passion project that came about from our own experiences with making cocktails.
We knew we represented a potential target market and from reviewing how websites and apps were currently presenting cocktail recipes, had our own ideas on how this experience could be improved.
We wanted a better experience when it came to finding cocktail recipes and preparing drinks for ourselves and others. We wanted to create a platform that was useful for someone who had never made a cocktail and for someone who was an adept cocktail enthusiast.
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After analysing the results of our research we updated our goal to encapsulate what we wanted to achieve overall:
We're designing a platform that provides the modern adult with an inspiring array of cocktail recipes that can be made at any skill level, and a community of cocktail enthusiasts.
For the initial phase I used OOUX to explore and define the system, aligning the user's mental model of cocktails in the digital and physical spaces with our goal.
Through our research I had found several words that were used frequently and that were commonly associated with cocktails. I foraged for further related nouns and consolidated this list into a select group of objects. These were to be the main objects that I would explore further and develop a system around.
Main objects: Cocktail, Ingredient, Equipment, Menu, Tip & Article
I then went on to exploring the relationships that these objects had with one another, creating a visual diagram to represent this, with an accompanying description of the relationships in more detail.
In the final steps of the discovery phase I listed the potential actions that could be taken on each object and mapped out the metadata and core content within these objects.
With a basic structure established, I collaborated with my design partner to explore these objects in more detail in order to unify our understanding and to work out exactly how they functioned with our system.
Our first task was to create an object guide that would serve as a glossary and reference point for our objects. We agreed on a definition and its purpose in the system, what metrics we could use to determine its success, who owned instances of this object, what were groups of these called, and listed examples of each object.
With our understanding of the objects aligned, we then went on to exploring the relationships between each.
In our exploration we delved deep into how each object related with one another and in doing so, uncovered two new objects that were essential in detailing how a cocktail was made and in providing users with different skill levels of cocktail preparation.
New objects: Step (the individual task within a cocktail's list of instructions), Preparation Method (the different ways the same cocktail could be created and prepared).
We moved to Airtable in order to update our CTA matrix, detailing the why and when of each object action to better understand the user's motivations.
In the last step of requirements we examined the metadata and core content for our objects, defining the specific aspects of these attributes like user permissions and privacy, and conditional logic.
In this round we went over our objects, relationships, CTAs and attributes again to assign project phases that would define an MVP and first phase of implementation.
We decided to focus on the core functionality of discovering, searching, and creating cocktails, with tips and articles providing informative and educational content, and push the community aspect to the next phase. This was to allow us to test the most important parts of the experience and develop our system further only once we had confirmed the success of the first phase.
From this narrowed set of must-haves we could now develop a nav flow to illustrate the main drivers of navigation. Establishing this gave us a clear view of how users would interact with the objects and a preview of the screens that would make up this experience.
Building on from the nav flow, I illustrated the objects in cards, lists and pages. I created mid-fidelity designs for the main screens in Figma and a prototype to be handed over to my design partner in preparation of the high-fidelity designs.
