2024

Garnish

Modernising the cocktail experience
UX Research
UX Design
Top
Research
Design

Context

I teamed up with a friend and fellow designer to work on a passion project that came about from a discussion on how we thought cocktail apps were out-of-date.

Goal

To create a better digital experience when it came to finding cocktail recipes and preparing drinks for ourselves and others.

How it all started

User journey Brainstorm

It was a conversation that had us sharing our own experiences with cocktails – mainly from the perspective of my bartender days and my friend from making cocktails at home. We both had opinions as guests attending various events.

Together we created what we thought the journey to consider was and began our thinking from there, focusing on someone hosting an event.

The insights gained from this exercise highlighted user needs centered around guidance and inspiration, organisation and planning, and education, with pain points including overwhelming options and time management.

This exercise was useful but limited due its focus on event hosting, neglecting other user experiences, skill levels and accessibility requirements.

We knew we had to do more research to better understand who our users were and the larger cocktail experience.

Research

Initial Unknowns

  • Who is the modern adult, what are they like?
  • What are their motivations around cocktails/mixology?
  • What solutions or approaches currently exist?

I performed a 3-week research sprint to provide a solid and informed foundation to design from.

User Interviews

I lead 10 user interviews to figure out who our users were, their goals and pain points.

The key findings from the interviews were:

  • User types ranged from occasional enthusiasts to regular mixologists.
  • Users want to discover/explore, experiment/create, share/collaborate.
  • Frustrations were centred around overwhelming search results.

Contextual Observations

I observed people in physical and digital environments to discover what they did when enjoying cocktails as hosts and guests:

At Home
  • Prefer a well-organised home bar with essential tools easily accessible.
  • Often personalise their home bar space with unique glassware and decorative elements.
  • Tend to arrange ingredients based on frequency of use.
  • Created cocktails based on a skill level deriving from their prior knowledge of cocktails.
Social Events/Gatherings
  • Prioritise visually appealing cocktails with creative presentations and garnishes.
  • Actively engage with friends, sharing experiences and seeking recommendations.
  • Diverse drink preferences that can change from one event to the next.
Online/Social Media
  • Actively share their cocktail creations on social media platforms via images and videos.
  • Seek recognition and validation from peers for their mixology skills.
  • Often follow and engage with mixology trends.
  • Explore articles related to various drink topics.

Competitive Analysis

Comparing 8 cocktail apps I assessed how they performed in the factors of UX/UI, Features & Functionality, Recipe Database, Search & Filtering Options, Ingredient Information, Personalisation, Community & Socialisation and Educational Content. I described how well they did in each, giving an overall rating out of 10.

The main findings were:

  • A clean and visually appealing interface is essential.
  • To allow for exploration through related content.
  • There were minimal inclusive search features and cocktail groupings.
  • Most had a lack of educational content and informative topics on mixology.
  • Nearly all had no video content.

User Personas

After synthesising the research results I created four user personas representing our target market and focused on two main user types.

The New User Journey

I revised the user journey my friend and I had created in our initial conversation to represent the newly understood journey that users cycled through. Users could go back and forth between these stages depending on the occasion and skill level, and would utilise our platform to aid them throughout their journey.

Search & Discover

Users search and filter results to find specific recipes or browse through curated collections. This phase focuses on inspiring users with new ideas and helping them find the perfect drinks for any occasion.

Create & Experiment

Users create their own unique cocktails or put a twist on classic recipes. This phase encourages users to experiment with new combinations and techniques, fostering a sense of innovation and personal expression.

Learn & Improve

Users deepen their mixology knowledge and skills through exploring existing recipes, reading articles and watching video tutorials and tips. This phase is focused on continuous learning, skill development, and becoming more proficient in the art of cocktail making.

From here we could confidently explore a solution that could serve our users, no matter the occasion or level of cocktail experience.

Design

Once we had analysed 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.

With this renewed goal in mind I employed OOUX to define our system through a thorough exploration of the objects most commonly associated with cocktails. This was to ensure our system aligned with our user's mental models, creating an intuitive and engaging user experience.

The ORCA process explores objects, their relationships, calls-to-actions and attributes through iterative rounds of user-centered thinking that translate research and requirements into justified and clarified design.

Discovering Our Objects

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.

I then went on to exploring the relationships that these objects had with one another, creating a simple diagram to represent this, with an accompanying description of the relationships in more detail. This was essential in discovering how each of the objects were connected.

The next step was to think about the actions that users could take on each object, introducing the roles of guest, member and admin users within our system.

In the final step of the discovery phase I listed the metadata and core content within to create an object map. This served as a holistic picture of the main objects and a key artefact of the ORCA process.

A closer look at our 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.

In our exploration we delved deep into how each object related with one another and in doing so, defined new objects that were essential in providing users with different skill levels of cocktail preparation and ways to illustrate the instructions.

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.

Splitting our project into phases

In this round we went over our objects, relationships, CTAs and attributes again to assign project phases that would define an MVP and the next phase of implementation.

Phase 1

Core functionality of discovering, searching, and creating cocktails and menus, with tips and articles providing informative and educational content.

Phase 2

User ratings, multi-media cocktail instructions and gamification elements to encourage and reward desired user activity.

Visualising our system and objects

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 needed to make up this experience.

I followed this up by creating a site map to show the main pages of the system covering the entire journey of the first phase.

Building on from the nav flow and site map, 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 design and branding strategy.