Overview
Sipped Sense is a mobile application designed to make choosing and creating alcoholic beverages a lot easier. With it, users can filter recipes based on taste as well as on local bars around you to allow for a fully customizable drinking experience. This app also features a randomization tool for those who can't decide on what to drink at the moment.
This was created as part of an assignment for my User-Center Design course, in which I worked with three other students with the sole objective of designing a user experience based on a topic of our choice. As former college students who enjoy having drinks occasionally, we wanted a tool that allows us to easily choose and create our own drinks regardless of the time of day.
Why We Stand Out?
While conducting our current market analysis, we discovered that many drinking apps had features that enabled users to search drinks by name and ingredient. However, very few had the ability to customize drink recipes based on certain preferences like garnish or flavor profile, thus limiting the various possibilities of drinks out there. Therefore, the challenge with Sipped Sense was to create a platform for users to fully customize the drinks they want with ease.
Some of our competitors include Cocktail Flow, Drink Master, Highball, and 8,500+ Drink Recipes.
User Research
In order to fully understand who are target audience was for Sipped Sense, we identified three distinct user groups: college students, young couples, and parents. From there, we came up with fictional user personas for each group respectively.
User persona for Veronica Pierce
We then came up with some survey/interview questions, which were posted online using SurveyMonkey, to help gauge what users REALLY wanted most from of our app. Based on the responses we received, finding simple and cheap recipes was the number one priority while keeping taste and flavors in mind.
Experience and Interface Design
Once all the user data was gathered, we decided to bring Sipped Sense to life. This began by designing detailed sets of both low-fidelity and medium-range wireframes as well as adding prototype interaction in Adobe XD.
Low-fidelity hand-drawn wireframes
Mid-range fidelity digital prototype
Before moving on to the visuals, we had to let users test our mid-range designs for functionality and accessibility. From there, we created three different high-fidelity designs (all styled and colored) and gave users the power to choose which one resonated with them the most.
High-fidelity wireframes
Based on user feedback, we discovered that most users gravitated towards design option C due to the vibrant color scheme, the use of geometric shapes, and the minimal yet modern design approach.
Visual Design
Since we had the winning high-fidelity design (Option C) to work from, it was time to create our style guide. When choosing the colors, we felt as though purple and red fit well with our app because they're fun, modern, and inviting. More specifically, red represents knowledge and power, and is often associated with food. Purple, on the other hand, represents equality and is viewed as a universal color. This is what also inspired the creation of the app's background design which is essentially a gradient ranging from purple to red.
Outcome
As a result, we produced a high-fidelity prototype that was verified through our end users. The app's features include the following:
1. Find a Drink: Searches for a specific kind of drink, ranging from vodka to gin.
2. Randomize My Drink: Randomly selects a drink for users who are unsure of what to get.
3. Find My Bar: Searches for local bars that have the specific drink you're looking for.
Conclusion
Overall, this project turned out very successful. During this process, I was fortunate enough to work with a group of talented and hard-working designers in creating a user experience that makes choosing and creating drinks much more engaging and intuitive. Even though there were a few minor setbacks that got in the way of our final product, such as incomplete button interactions due to time constraints and being inexperienced with the Adobe XD software, we still managed to pull through in the end. Ultimately, I was able to learn a lot about the user-centered design process and its' importance to creating products.
