ABOUT

Following the success of the Beer Experience app, Bavaria hired my company for a further expansion of the project. The focus of this particular project was centred on the physical interaction at the partnered supermarket chain Carulla (part of the largest supermarket chain in Colombia), which was at the moment redesigning its interior to attract users by creating an atmosphere of luxury and exclusivity.

For this project, we worked together with a firm of architects specialized in pub interior designs. Together we came up with the idea of having a central touch screen that would become the centre of attention for the customers. On that screen, users would interact with a digital recreation of a draft where they could choose between all the 135 beer references, learn a bit about their history, beer type, origin, suggested pairings, and recipes.

An important and innovative contribution of this experience was the ability to find the beer on the shelves by mixing a virtual UX with reality. Under my supervision, we built a system that responded to a customer choosing a beer on the screen. If a beer was elected, then one of the tens of special-purpose light bulbs in the beer section would start blinking to indicate the beer’s location and guide the user to it immediately.

This project was very successful and we created 5 different versions of it for different cities around the country, one of which was developed to be used on a transparent touch screen with the physical beer bottles behind the screen which exhibited the information in a very infographic way over each bottle. Apart from the innovation side of the project, we had an average of 6.000 daily interactions in the supermarkets. Furthermore, we gathered a large amount of data and analysed it which served Bavaria and Carulla to gain data-supported insights about the public interest and beer preferences for future projects.