Bacardi Startender
Design Envisioning | Prototyping | Wireframes
My Role
Human Experience Designer
Assisting customer Bacardi through design envisioning and prototyping at Microsoft OneWeek Hackathon
Goal
Help transform Bacardi's business needs into application requirements and digital prototypes in 3 days through proof of concept session and hacking
Key Accomplishments
Design Envisioning
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Facilitated design thinking session with customer by helping structure their ideas and business requirements into user-centered goals for a bartending and party planning application​​
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Interviewed bartenders, Bacardi employees, and party planners to understand users' wants and needs for the application. Structured these goals into a user goal hierarchy for prototyping
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Prototyping/Wireframes
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Built out prototypes for the experience of a host/hostess planning a party using the Bartender application. Prototypes helped users plan an event, choose a bartender, and request to book a bartender
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Customer was able to leave hackathon with prototypes for future development of their application
Design Envisioning
We spent the day whiteboarding with Bacardi so we could understand their most important goals. We broke the application into two main user goals from this session:
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As a bartender, I want to find employment opportunities in my area which leverage my unique drink-crafting abilities​​
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As a host or hostess, I want to throw a memorable event with high-quality cocktails which match the theme and needs of my party
Prototyping
Remarks
Tyler Gibson | Principal HX Manager @ Microsoft
"Melanie was supposed to be shadowing and assisting me, but she went above and beyond. Simply put – had Melanie not been on the team, we would not have delivered anything.
Melanie stepped in on Day 1 to facilitate the whole group’s design thinking while I had to step away.
She did an incredible job in documenting the ideation and structuring the thoughts and ideas from Bacardi’s experts. We used Sketch to build out a high fidelity mock prototype of the app, and Melanie was responsible for building nearly half the experience.
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She stayed up late, filled in gaps, and worked extremely well with the customer to translate needs into design deliverables. The quality of her UX work is commercial quality. The MS members and several of the Bacardi attendees individually commented on how impressed they were with her communication, design deliverables and work ethic through the hack.
I really hope we can keep finding meaningful UX/HX work to take advantage of Melanie’s skillset here in CSE."
