Brewhunt
Brewhunt is a mobile application for the craft beer enthusiast. It combines a sophisticated, straightforward search tool with a user-built beer index to create a fun means to find, sort, review, and store new brews.
The Process
Brewhunt packs a lot of punch, so my sketchbooks were always close by through the early development cycle so I could get my ideas down whenever they came. Development went through several cycles to map the search from sketch to prototype. Following stakeholder interviews, development moved from sketchbook to wireframes in Adobe XD, where a fully-functional prototype was ultimately built and tested.
UX Challenges
The biggest hurdle was usability in the search function. We defined two distinct personas: the Beer Snob and the Enlightened Casual. The latter might be content with a single text field to enter “hoppy” or “PBR,” while the former could scroll through dozens of intimately-specific queries before smashing the search button for an intimately-specific beer. The challenge was to meld the two needs – not just compromise.
The solution was a search function broken down into four parts: term, category, ABV (alcohol by volume denominator), and proximity. Users can use as many or as few of the array in their search, granting more- or less-specific results based on the query. The top three results are each delivered with a matching percentage based on the search and with a short profile of the beer, followed by the rest of the results in a list view. Each of the results also links to a profile page: another chamber of the heart in Brewhunt. Here users can share ratings, reviews, and purchase locations for the beer, which keeps the user-created beer index constantly updated.
Branding
It was important to bring something immediately fun to the Brewhunt mark. Brewhunt is all about sharing beer knowledge and discovery, so it can’t stick itself directly to either the highbrow beer-snobs or the casual “all-beer-tastes-the-same”-ers; inherently, Brewhunt needs both people. By making itself fun, Brewhunt lands right in the middle of the two, and it sits them both down at the same table for a delicious chat. The mark itself is playful and connects to multiple motifs at once: exploring, discovery, and (spoiler alert) beer. Its rounded edges and simple, stylized visuals read with a welcoming tone, and connect users to the easy-to-use functions. It even gets some extra mileage by recycling the magnifying glass/beer glass icon as the “search” icon throughout the app menus.
