The Anti-App
Design Lead at New Belgium
Lean into the cultural tension that people spend more time on their phones than they should in social settings.
Strategy:
An app that doesn’t require any interaction in order to maintain the status quo, allowing users to enjoy their beer.
Design:
Leadership:
As the design lead for Beer Mode I directed the overall product experience and interface design for the application.
We've all got a buddy with their nose in a phone, Facetweeting or Snapgramming through what might once have been an enjoyable human experience. Beer Mode is here to help these smartphone addicts down a few pints without the tedium of keeping up with their social network. Select a personality and a timeframe, and this app will post tidbits of hilarity to your social account and vaguely reply back when your friend's comment. In a world saturated with apps that decrease human to human interactions, Beer Mode stands alone, at the bar, with a cold one. Built with New Belgium at the height of the ant-skeumorphic, flat design trend, this app was designed to be an odd-duck among the app store in-crowd.
Put down your phone and pick up a cold Beer with this anti-app.
A GIF driven menu painted the picture of each flavor profile with IBU and ABV meters that animated based on the beer's actual metrics.
Brand Ethos
New Belgium brewery is a self-made, employee owned stalward of the in-your-face micro brewery movement that swept the nation in the late 90's and early Aughts. Their brand could care less about trends in ingredients or what the most popular IPA might be this week. As such, their digital representation begged to be as different as possible from the look and feel of competitive beer-focused mobile apps.
Product Design
While the look and feel of Beer Mode was truly one of a kind, the underlying UX architecture enabled a whopping 40% of folks who opened the app to successfully post to Facebook and view one or more beers in the menu. The learning here is that although an interface might be custom or unexpected, with strong experience principles the product can still perform well from an analytics perspective.
Product Design
Beer Mode is an automatic social bot that preys upon the better judgement of friends who unwittingly participate in a pragmatic ruse for anti-social technophobes.
Role:
Design Lead
Services:
Research, Strategy, Design
Partner:
New Belgium
Status:
Launched, 2013
