Creating the ultimate
guide to going-out in London
UX AND UI DESIGN
DrinkUp.London was founded in 2015 as a parent brand for the company behind festivals such as London Cocktail Week and London Beer Week. The directors wanted to improve the brand’s digital presence to increase engagement with their millennial customer base. They also wanted to move away from physical tickets and passes to an e-commerce system with digitised equivalents.
An app would help achieve this, with the potential to offer a personalised user experience with custom recommendations and notifications, especially during the week-long festivals. To kick the project off, I conducted research with existing customers about their needs and frustrations finding bars and events online and experience booking DrinkUp events and festivals.
The new app needed to both reinforce the brand’s image as the go-to guide for bars and drink events in London and offer a seamless digital booking and ticketing system.
I worked with an external development team and key internal stakeholders to craft the design and experience for both the IOS and android app. This included working on information architecture, user experience, rapid prototyping, visual design and delivery of the final product.
Initial brainstorming and ideation
Following initial user research and agreement of key project objectives, I led a group of key stakeholders to brainstorm how the mobile experience could look and feel. We initially focussed on simple user journeys such as accessing key content and completing key tasks like buying a festival pass.
User flows and wireframes
An initial set of journeys was agreed upon to allow for key user flows to be created. Based on these I then created low-fi wireframes to allow for prototyping and testing.
Digital brand guidelines
I created digital brand guidelines that could be applied to the app, a website upgrade and other future digital touch points. This focussed on a slick, understated style which gave additional emphasis to the bar and drink photography. Three distinctive colour themes were created to give prominence to elements related to the three core festivals.
Final UI designs
The final UI designs were created in groups over a series of three sprints and handed over to the external development team via Zeplin. I worked closely with the developers to ensure designs were followed accurately.
A digital wallet was created to store digital event tickets and passes. Based on user research, I included functionality in the app allowing users to send passes to friends which they could activate having downloaded the app. To ensure that passes were non-transferable, I also added a photo upload requirement.
The app was successfully launched in 2017 helping London Cocktail Week grow and achieve its greatest number of attendees, alongside a fully digitised ticket and pass system.
