Mariner Brewing: Beer Log

User research, UX design

Duration

Jan 2021 - Mar 2021

Team

Ben Kwok
Bryan To
Catelyn Sue

Roles

Product design
User interviews
User scenario storyboarding
Illustration

OVERVIEW & OPPORTUNITY

Mariner Brewing Company is a craft brewery in Coquitlam, B.C., deeply connected to their values of community, quality, and their drive to explore territory unknown. The beer journal was made to highlight their exploratory batches program, where every week, they would release a new flavour of beer for a limited time.

KEY ARTIFACTS

Customer journey

To get a better understanding of Mariner's demographics, employees of the store helped us in segmenting Mariner's customers into three groups - those new to beer, beer enthusiasts, and social beer drinkers. With our personas in mind, our team also created a customer journey map outlining the taproom experience to identify where we would be able to encourage beer drinkers to better get to know Mariner's beer offerings.

User personas to represent the three customer segments of Mariner.

The first user journey map, representing in-store drinking experiences.

User Workshops

To supplement the information we had gained from brewery employees, our team conducted participatory workshops via Zoom and Miro. Workshop activities included idea sprints, visual collaging, q&a's, and keyword brainstorming.

A report on the number of participants that attended our workshops.

Key Insights

1. Amongst customers, there was a lack of awareness and information from Mariner about their changing beer lineups.

2. Community events would effectively allow customers to engage with the Mariner brand.

3. Lack of availability and consistency made it difficult for customers to find certain beers.

FINAL PRODUCT

The Beer Journal

Mariner's Beer Journal is a new space for customers to keep their thoughts about brews that are new to them. Each page has a carbon page attached, which customers can submit to the brewery in exchange for a sticker. After collecting a certain amount of stickers, they will be able to redeem rewards such as gift cards or discounts.

Usage

Each page in the beer journal is divided into the following sections. To ensure that filling out the pages would not be overwhelming for the customer, we made sure that they would not be required to answer more questions than necessary.

Examples of pages for the customer to fill out.

The goal of the journal is to create a new way for Mariner Brewing to gather customer feedback, as well as promote their consistenly rotating selection of new brews in a fashion that leans into their brand's core values - exploration and discovery.

For the customer, beyond the promise of rewards, the journal allows for them to look back on their tastes in beer. Another important aspect is the ability for customer to write their thoughts by hand - by emulating an experience similar to an explorer writing in his travel journal, the journal helps create a unique connection between the customer and their beer; not to mention that hand-writing is proven to improve memory retention.

REFLECTION

I found the biggest challenge in this project was framing the problem in order to guide our solution. As the amount of data we collected diversified, I found that it became increasingly difficult to balance all of our information to help ideate a solution that would help satisfy the customer's needs while staying within the business' interests. Overall, this project was an eye-opening opportunity where I was able to learn how vital qualitative research is and the ways in which it influences the outcome of a project.

ERIKA WANG

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