Let’s face it. Most of America either finds a place to drink after a long day at work, or they head home to be productive and get ready for the next day. During the weekdays, countless adults work hard, spending hours doing their best to be their best selves at jobs. However, for some people, they find themselves in a situation where going home isn’t working for them. Sometimes it’ll be the coffee shops, but like always, everyone thinks the same thing after they get out of work or school. It is trying to find a table after school is a madhouse. No can-do sir, and that’s how my adventure into the bar scene does as well.
So why did I choose this industry? My final choice took quite some time and some hard decisions on my final choice. The second of the two options was the travel business. I’d help develop technology that would break language barriers concerning travelers. The other industry that I was interested in was cybernetic enhancements for amputee victims. The choice was made because of injuries I had, not only from the time in the military but also beyond it made me sympathetic to their pain. It’s a broad spectrum of different industries. These top three interests of mine were chosen all because of my past experiences. My final decision for selecting the bar industry is for my love of the art of bartending. How two people, one the bartender and the other the customer can share a moment with a simple cocktail.
My adventure into the bar scene started shortly after my 21st. I was still in the military and finally assigned to the first duty station: Nellis Air Force Base, just north of Las Vegas. I saw it as a blessing. It was a young adults’ playground, with everything in an easy brisk walk down the strip — the perfect place for a young man. I looked great; I had what most people a stable job and was single. It wasn’t easy; however, finding places that everyone congregated and met socially, and finding people that were my age that wanted to go out was pretty hard. The leading group that I went out with hit some speed bumps during our little benders on the weekend, namely finding places that weren’t for tourists and what days to go. It wasn’t until much, much later that most locals went to different locations on certain days that had the best sales or went to individual bars that had different specials at different times.
Once I started getting into the industry, I realized this was commonplace almost everywhere, people that are either just visiting a place or just moved into a new area would like to know where to go. Using a PEST analysis, I was able to conclusively determine if my application would be used in today’s society. In one survey done by SurveyMonkey, the many different kinds of drink habits can be affected by the different times you start drinking, what kind of alcohol you drink, even your alcohol tolerance level. A link to that survey is shown here: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/arunmikkilineni/9-political-views-we-can-deduce-from-your-drinking-habits. Economically, excessive drinking or binge drinking is an enormous problem. However, our community has been very proactive in facing this problem, such as higher taxes and curbing times for bar. Not only that, public modes of transportation that people use to get home, such as Uber or Lyft are ever-increasing in larger cities. In a social aspect, drinks and networking somewhat go hand in hand. People all the time somehow find jobs or meet people through the course of a single nights’ adventures. Drinking somehow always breaks the communicative barrier for many socially awkward people. For others, it’s a time to meet with friends after a long work week and relax and talk with one another. Viewing this through the technology aspect, the competition for this kind of app is very slim, only because most bars don’t feel the need to advertise themselves, their work speaks for themselves, and it’s through word of mouth that great places are remembered.
By using this matrix, I realized the two main ideas or topics. In creating apps that target the bar industry; different areas of expertise and their target crowd are either particular as in a few people in the community or cover an entire city. The graph above shows that having a more substantial area with more mixed reviews are crucial for this kind of application. By using this graph lead to the realization of my application to be successful, my application would need to have an advantage in creating more customer reviews, and it would be able to cover almost every city that any traveler would be able to use.
The user interview process went very well. Having these user interviews themselves gave me some better and varied views on the drinking app itself. So, some of the questions I had asked people was:
· How often do you drink?
· How often do you find yourself looking for a place to drink while traveling?
· Would you instead see a busy bar or club on the weekends?
· Beer or hard liquor, as in cocktails and shots?
· Do you check yelp or often google when you want to go somewhere at night?
· Do you usually stay at a spot you frequent, or do you try new places?
· Do you typically get a drink after work or school?
· Do you believe you can work better at a bar instead of an overcrowded coffee place if given the belief that there would be free wifi and tables to work at
These questions were answered by people that were the various bars that I went to at different times of the day. I believe that the problems were not biased because the people that would be my target audience will be mainly people that do drink. Not only did I ask the customers, I also asked the bartenders themselves. Coming from the bar industry myself, I knew many people that work in this field could tell me what t can be improved and what should stay the same.
What I found during the interviews wasn’t surprising: the people that only drank at bars were very excited about the idea of the app. One person thought it would be a great alternative than yelp or google. Exclusively because the app focuses mainly on different bars and what kind of drinks they usually provide, in essence, their online menu and different specials are going on. The other side, the people that work at these places themselves thought this idea would be somewhat hard to implement. They asked me about how the bars themselves would be able to register so many people while at the same time be able to do their job. So ease of access for the workers themselves would be my biggest issue and how to get around that issue.
For my networking event, I attended a cocktail 101 mixology class hosted by beverageacademy.com. I was fortunate enough to participate in the category for free, which is usually $100 per course. During this class, I was able to meet other bartenders from the city, honing their profession, and become experts in their field.
While we drank and went through the different shaking and mixing techniques, I was able to talk to most of them and talk about the app and its potential in the bar scene. I wanted to see if new bartenders had some ideas that I could use to improve the apps’ potential in such a big industry. Some ideas that we talked about was linking up with the POS system that any bar would use. Every time a customer would open a tab or buy a drink with either cash or money, the system would log the purchase and update the app. I aid individuals who are of legal drinking age to leave there comfort zone and explore their own city or travelers in different cities that would enjoy going out to drinks with friends or even going to places — implementing a heatmap API to establish different bars that are either extremely populated with people or not crowded for the people that want to have a relaxed time drinking — then using google maps to give the user the most efficient ways to get to that location. This app will also inform if there are any specials, such as a UFC fight, sports game being televised, a special drink, and most current customer reviews about each location.
This application not only has an advantage over Yelp and Swig is that this application’s attention is on the bar industry. Keeping it extremely simple, I can cater to not only the needs of the bar and the workers involved but also the regulars that frequent the bar. No longer will people who travel to different cities for either work, fun, some tech event have to look through yelp and their varied results about restaurants, hotels anything else because its focus is bars and the bartenders that pour drinks. People that are locals who’d want to explore their city tired of full coffee shops can visit other places that have the same amenities.
My user journey started with a passion for finding new places to explore in different cities at night. I would open the app itself, and a simple search of the town or location would pull up a map based on our search. By experimenting with some search parameters, the app would locate all the bars within the said area and display a heat graph. Each distinctive heat signature would let me know which bars are either extremely busy or calm and quiet. Below the map itself would have the different names, ratings, and recent customer reviews of each bar itself. Clicking each bar name or picture itself would show the distance away from my location and then below those numbers would show special drinks for their drink menu, the bars’ theme, and a few pictures of the bars themselves.
This user journey was pretty simple, something that I’ve thought about quite a lot during my time visiting new places or just going out with friends. The user journey experience would help my mindmap because not only would it help the app flow from one window to the next, building the application would be easier to design.
The wireframe below this paragraph shows a very rough sketch of how I would like my application to be. Creating this wireframe again allows me to have a new visualization of what needs to be on what page, how everything would look like on a web browser. In future projects, I hope that this application can apply not only bars but music events, concerts, or even festivals such as Coachella or Electric Daisy Carnival.
