Mixie
Helping Mixers find their Moxie.
My Role: UX Designer | Duration: 2 Weeks | Project Status: Concept
Do you ever get to the bar/liquor store and simply not know where to start? This little question got everything started.
“We want to help people feel confident exploring new cocktails by giving them quick, accessible education into the wide world of mixology.”
Research/Discovery
But what was the problem people where really experienced? To verify this, we set up a discussion guide with our target audience and conducted user interviews. However, through these initial user interviews, we invalidated our hypothesis. Our interviewees were already confident with their drink preferences and having the ability to make them, but they did see the usefulness of a resource both to expand that knowledge and to suggest new drink ideas. We combed these interviews for trends and overall trends in their experiences using a process called affinity mapping, and crafted a Persona, Sage, a caricature of our target user, out of those trends. We then got to know our persona better with a Journey Map, wherein we stepped into Sage’s shoes and shared her experience struggling to set up cocktails for a house party. We learned where exactly we could mix in to Sage’s tribulations, and we revised our problem statement to.
Hypothesis:
People want a resource to learn more about unfamiliar liquors to more confidently order or make drinks.
Revised Problem Statement:
How might we provide an educational resource for Sage to develop her mixology skills, so that she can impress her guests with delicious cocktails?
Design
We leveraged a Feature Prioritization activity to reach consensus on the elements we knew Mixie would need, and did a few lightning Design Studio rounds to collaborate on a visual design, where we moved ahead with our snazzy mid-century-modern style. We ended up with Mixie- a sophisticated app that delivers you deeper into the world of mixology with recipe suggestions, mixology tutorials, liquor organization features, and much more.
Once we’d transformed our design concepts into a mid-fi Figma prototype, we ran some Usability Testing based on tasks our persona Sage might face in her day-to-day. We got some valuable feedback and generally favorable success in the tests, so we analyzed the feedback and evolved our prototype into a Hi-Fidelity Mockup. We ran a second round of Usability Tests on our spiffy new platform, and discovered that while our volunteers were enchanted by our visual design, the architecture of the application still needed a little work. However, every one of our volunteers could not get enough of our design or idea, gushing about how much they’d use our app in their lives, and how delightful they found our style!
With these favorable results, it occurred to us that an excellent way to jump-start the building of Mixie’s loyal audience was to secure a partnership with an established bigwig in fine drinking and dining; naturally, Bon Apetit was selected as a possible platform partner. Moving forward in Mixie’s life cycle, there’s all sorts of pizzazz we can add with BA’s help- a recipe roulette, various API’s with established internet greats like Google and Mixolopedia. We forecast what a successful Mixie would bring us and our partner- lots of traffic between Mixie and Bon Apetit, scores of users making profiles and sharing recipes with their friends- and that’s a happy tipsy world indeed.
WRITTEN BY
Clara Perez
(in collaboration with Isley Bolar, Morph Borch, & Savannah Niemeyer)
