House of Funk

House of Funk Brewery is more than just a brewery. It’s a roastery, an industry leader, a community, and a vibe. Working with House of Funk, we employed techniques such as ethnographic studies, persona creation, participatory workshops, and journey mapping to answer the question: How can we make customer fall in love with House of Funk through in-house interactions.

This led to creation of the Interactive Beer Lens, an Augmented Reality experience that can be accessed through beer coasters, or as easter eggs hidden around the brewery. The AR experience allows for costumers to go beyond the beer and to form a deeper connection with the brand. For my role, I was mainly responsible for user research and prototyping, including the final AR design.

Section 01

Framing & Research

Discovering a design opportunity was actually the major focus of this 12-week project and the team had to employ various methods to understand the main goal of our stakeholders and their customers. We conducted our research and framing through ethnographic studies, interviews, persona creation, user journey mapping, and a stakeholder workshop.

Ethnographic Studies and Interviews

We started with our research by conducting two ethnographic studies of the customers and their behaviour, one on a regular weeknight and one during a busy Bingo event. At this stage, I helped conduct interviews with different types of consumers, and our stakeholders. With the qualitative data gathered, we conducted a thematic analysis to identify three different themes: Inconsistent Branding, Lack of Regulars, Release Schedule

Distilling these themes into a single design focus, we realised we want to explore the different touch points between a customer and the various HOF products, as well as the different environment associated with them. All the While keeping in mind the varying levels of knowledge about brewing or coffee roasting, as these touchpoints, need to be informative and consistent.

Persona Creation

Keeping our design focus in mind and using the qualitative data we had collected, we created three personas that would capture the different types of customers that go to House of Funk. To create these personas, I decided that traditional design personas did not provide the appropriate information needed for our project.

So instead of including information such age, gender, and a biography, I created our personas using a story and a list of goals for each. These were then supplemented with quotes from our interviews and google location reviews.

To take our personas even a step further, I carefully chose a House of Funk beer that reflected these personas even more and completed the image of our users through taste and smell.

User Journey Mapping

With our personas and users defined, we conducted 4 more interviews to map out the user journey of customers before, during and after visiting House of Funk. We then used this information to identify exact touchpoints that we could intervene in order to either increase brand awareness, or to move users towards becoming a regular.

At this point of the project, we also refined our design focus as we realised within the user journey, there is a disconnect between the online perception and in-house experience, which makes it difficult for the right customers to form a deep connection to House of Funk.

Section 02

The Solution

Due to House of Funk’s brand and voice constantly evolving and there not being too much of an emphasis on their online presence, we wanted to make the customer fall in love with House of Funk by going past the beer to form a deeper connection with the brand inside the brewery itself. After going through a couple rounds of ideation and prototyping, we created our final solution, the Interactive Beer Lens, and by extension the Funkverse.

As a customer orders a beer, they are given a matching coaster with a QR code. Once this QR code is scanned, their coaster is transformed into an interactive AR experience where the customer can see more information behind the creation of the beer, the roots of its name, and to understand how the different brewing methods relate connect to the overall brand of House of Funk.

Section 03

Future Implications

As an extension to the Interactive Beer Lens, we also imagined a Funkverse, an interactive world only accessible through AR with QR codes acting as portals or windows to this world. Examples of these portals are a QR code hidden near the large mural on the brewery walls, that show the user the painting process behind it and information on the artist.

Another example is a QR code placed inside the neon-colored bathrooms that allow the users to take selfies (80% of our interviews stated this was one of their favorite things to do) with a custom filter.