Digital Bartender

What do you do if you want to mix a drink, but you don’t have a shot glass? Or anything to measure with? What if all you have is a cup and a phone? We set out to solve that problem in a Digital Jam for our client Keurig Dr Pepper.

Our Digital Jam pulls in people from all disciplines to work together to come up with out-of-the-box ideas that might not fit into a client’s normal planning cycle. It was in the 2017 Digital Jam that the idea for the 7UP Digital Bartender was born. From a simple 3-minute pitch, the idea was green-lit and assigned to creative and production teams to bring the idea to life.

The Digital Bartender grew out of the idea that 7UP is a traditional drink mixer for many cocktails. Our team realized that cocktail recipes are just ratios of liquids. Building off of that, they decided to throw out the normal recipe format and represent the recipes visually as layers in a glass for the rough prototype. As soon as our creative team determined the creative direction, interactive mockups were created, and we began live testing with users.

Over the course of three days, the user experience team let small groups use the prototype for short 10-minute tests. Group testing encouraged dialogue between participants and allowed for quicker feedback from more people. The data gathered was immediately used to change the prototype for the following day’s test. By the end of the third day of testing, all usability testing concerns had been addressed and solutions validated. New users were able to quickly understand the concept and how to use the web app.

While all of the above was happening, our development team was working to utilize the existing library of drink recipes on 7UP.com. Parallel development meant that once final creative and usability testing were complete, the finished web app was turned around very quickly.

The successful launch event was definitely hands-on, designed to allow all who attended to mix drinks using the web app. We got great responses from everyone, along with a number of great posts from social influencers that same night.