Constellation Brands

Timeline: 5 Weeks Role: UX Research and Design Tools: Axure RP, Keynote

Background

Constellation Brands (CBI) is a total beverage alcohol company that produces and sells beer, wine, and spirits internationally.

THE CHALLENGE
CBI has an MVP iOS mobile app called Ambassador that functions as a map-based product locator. It’s the only in-facing app that bridges all of the company’s beverage segments.

THE ASK
Explore additional features for a v2 that would encourage employees to consume and recommend more Constellation Brands products.

Our Approach

SUBJECT MATTER EXPERTS
We interviewed two subject matter experts at CBI to get the scoop on Ambassador, its original intention, and how often employees were using it. CBI saw Ambassador as a way to connect its employees across beverage segments, but it was difficult for non-sales employees to use. Ambassador is a stripped down sales app, which makes it more intuitive for sales employees.

DOMAIN RESEARCH
In our domain research, we learned that most of CBI’s major competitors have in-facing apps designed to engage their employees with their products. These apps include a variety of features that gave us a starting point for our user interviews. We ultimately wanted to know who CBI employees were and what they would find most useful and engaging.

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
We didn’t have access to competitor in-facing apps, so we used our competitive analysis to explore possible features for Ambassador. We looked at a variety of apps that offer map-based locators.

We looked at what they were doing well:

PROUD CONSTELLATION BRANDS EMPLOYEES

We spoke to 5 employees from various departments and beverage segments and learned:

1. CBI employees are proud to consume and recommend CBI products regularly.

2. There is interest in feeling like they are part of a larger CBI community.

3. They learn about products outside of their segments mostly by word-of-mouth.

We also noticed that they fell into two main user groups:

DEFINING THE PROBLEM

DESIGN PRINCIPLES

Ideation

CONCEPT VALIDATION
We came up with 8 concepts to address the three “what”s of our problem statement.
Identify Market Opportunities

Educate About CBI Products
With these concepts, we wanted to understand how employees would like to learn about CBI products.

Connect to Community
With these concepts, we wanted to understand to what extent employees wanted to engage with each other.

MAIN TAKEAWAY
Overall, our concept testing helped us understand what employees wanted most. They weren’t as interested in social engagement, but rather tools to help them do their jobs well.

Prototyping

TASTE PREFERENCES TOOL
We developed midfidelity prototypes from the concepts that tested well.

I worked on the taste preferences tool and started with beer. After some research, I discovered 9 taste preferences that could be put on a scale. This was a good opportunity to dig deep into Axure tutorials and learn how to make sliders and toggle buttons.

MERGING PROTOTYPES
For our final prototype , we combined our prototypes and added a bottom navigation bar to tie everything together. To do this, we looked at relationships between each prototype.

Relationships

1. We saw a strong relationship between the community channels and newsfeed and decided to merge them together, the former being an organizational structure for users to access desired content in the latter.

2. We saw the newsfeed and taste preferences recommendation tool as ways for employees to find products to search for using the product finder map.

Our Solution

Conclusion