PL | Design - Brewers Insight Product Design

Year

2022-2023

Roles

Information Architecture Design
UX Research
User Experience Design
Product Design

Project Overview

This project involved researching and developing new features for brewery management software.

The software would benefit from an interactive planner and reporting features to help users with their production and avoid any downtime related to supply chain and to fully utilize their operations.

I was responsible with researching the needs of the user and how similar products in the industry approached these requirements, conceptualizing UX flows and concepts. Being able to track and edit timelines for different production stages will improve user efficiency by increasing productivity and reducing potential user error with a more intuitive work flow.

Rough concept for BI planner feature and sidebar modal.

User Personas

Lauren (Brewery Operations Manager)

Lauren is responsible for the managing a small sized microbrewery in a rural community. The ongoing challenge with maintaining production capacity to be fully utilized is to have all nessessary materials onhand before they are required.

Some ingredients and packaging materials can have longer lead-times and supply chain delays, and shortages can lead to delayed production of finished products. As a small business, every minute, every glass of finished beer product counts as margins are tight.

Lauren is looking for ways to better plan their production demands and have a better outlook on what they need, how much and when. With better estimations, her brewery will minimize any possible downtime when waiting for materials and supply chain delays.

Manuel (Head Brewer | Production Manager)

Manuel oversees all brewhouse operations, from batch planning to finished product. He has experienced difficulty with having consistant and timely delivery of ingredients for his brew schedule.

Sometimes this has led to not having the nessessary ingredients on hand when needed, and last minute demand changes can have a cascading effect creating problems in production.

He is looking to better plan out future batches, and have the components nessessary for all batches planned at least a month ahead of schedule. This would also improve the sales operations, giving a more accurate picture of lead times for product availability for their customers.

UX Ideation | Brainstorming

Discovering requirements, researching the components of a potential feature start as ideas sketched on paper.

Planner User Flows

The flows nessessary for the brew planner feature concept include: Reporting, Batch Planner, Historical Batches, Batch Conflicts, Deleting Plans, Custom Items, Event Scheduling, Sub-features and Dashboard updates.

Showing user flow for Historical Batches

Showing user flows for Forecasting Reports, Historical Batches, and Full-Screen Toggle feature.

Showing user flows for Batch Splitting

Reflection

It was an intersting project which involved many of my interests in commercial beer production and product design.

The product was built to a certain stage before I became involved, and there were some technical aspects which would be changing in the future. I felt that I brought insight and expertise that was valuable and relivant to improving the product offering. My focus was to improve the ease of use and simplify the user experience based on competitive analysis. I would have enjoyed seeing these new features through the entire product development process, however budget, timing and prioritization had to be given to previous features that were still in progress.

My takeaway is that the importance of transparancy and project scope relating to available resources be evaluated in more detail before proceeding with any new feature development. What was described in the beginning as a new feature quickly developed into a set of features, more accurately designing a whole planning application. As a product designer, it is important to have unfiltered access to customer feedback to help inform the product iterations and roadmap.