I started this a personal project journey alongside with Miquel. The idea was to explore new ways of engaging users on a healthy lifestyle by creating user-friendly experiences.
The purpose of this project was to create a website that provides a customized user experience. We achieved this through the use of simple forms, eye-catching designs and illustrative icons.
BICRUSH is a web experience designed for those looking for a healthier alternative to traditional fast food. The product offers mainly two different products on one side: the more healthy option as a juice and the other side, the treat yourself option as a milkshake. Both products use the same flow based on the customized experience.
People are looking for unique products that give a different experience, they want to feel unique and special. Such is the world we live in today - transparency, social responsibility, and eco-friendliness are just some of the words that continuously emerge in our daily lives.
Nowadays in Spain, eco, bio, and organic products are more in demand. We wanted to create something that fits that range of natural products, without forgetting about the guilty pleasure we can have but not making a fast-food product. Based on this context we started the journey of this project.
· Design a user-friendly navigation to assist users in finding what they are looking for.
· Create a feeling of customization of the product for the user.
· Engage users in trying new flavor combinations to promote healthy lifestyles.
Based on the idea of promoting a healthy life and taking in consideration the scenario we live today, were the eco, bio, and organic products are more in demand, we started our own research.
We began with defining our target user: a middle-income group, we can separate this group in 2 parts the user interested in having a more healthy life and the one’s that already consider that have a healthy life style. Outside this definition what are the main reasons to make this group of users be engaged on a healthy lifestyle? what is the avagarge age of this users? what are the main reason to buy a new healthy product online? what are the main thing they look in a healthy product?
We created a quick survey and a script to perform user interviews. The results of both allowed us to have a better picture of who we were trying to approach:
· Age between 24-30 years old.
· They look for eye-catching packagings and tasty products. They say: We are tired of having the same "boring healthy flavors"
· On one side, 80% of the people answered the survey said they prefer natural products. On the other side, we found that the 20% prefer snacks or other products.
· The pricing and presentation of the product are the main things they look when buying a product online.
After all the insights we got from the survey and interviews, we deciced to proceed our benchmark focusing on drinked healthy products of our competitors. First we focused in Spain but we ended up opening to other markets to gather more data.
As we explored the market, we discovered there are many competitors in our space. We defined our product by looking at the ways they present their products, and using those to inform how we communicate ours.
As a result of completing the benchmark and analyzing the insights, we realized that we needed to cover both sides of this new drinkable healthy product. One side would be natural juice, and the other would be healthy milkshake.
Once the research was finished, we started suggesting ideas for the product. Based on the idea of creating this feeling of customization, we started defining how the online buying experience should be:
· Simple and self-explanatory to use, user needs to understand each step easily.
· The process should be visually appealing for the user but not overwhelming.
· Customizable, the user should feel their product is unique because they are creating it.
After defining the direction of the product we started the branding process:
Bicrush is about the concept of making a choice, picking your favourite products and creating a whole new experience from a perfect combination of flavours. We created the name using the same concept, by combining the prefix "bi" which means "twice, two" and "crush" meaning to squeeze or compress something forcefully together.
We wanted to create a palette that would remind our customers of their favorite drinks. We created a popular, colorful and at the same time peaceful palette with a flavor of happiness and energy. The palette is based on 3 colors: orange, yellow and pink. The pink color is used to highlight important elements and is complemented by a darker brown that we use on the logo and text of the website. We also included the normal white, and two shades of grey.
We've created a set of shapes and lines to bring a playful style to the BICRUSH packaging and website. The graphic resources are flexible, so you can use them in different variants with ease. We use the 3 primary colors on the palette which are pink, orange and yellow.
We used two fonts family. First one is Josefin Sans, a modern, versatile, and functional font with personality. It’s the perfect mix between serif and sans serif fonts that gives BICRUSH logo a unique look and helps it stand out. We used the font as well for the main titles on the website.
Second we choosed Montserrat font, a geometric sans-serif typeface that worked great next to Josefin Sans. We used Montserrat on the website, packaging, and other readable elements to ensure that everything has a consistent look and feel.
We wanted the icons to be part of the brand, so we created our own iconography set. The idea was to design an iconography that plays with the graphic element of the organic shape. The clean lines and minimalist style fit perfectly with the shapes behind, using the three main brand colours: banana, orange and strawberry.
The presentation of the product is important for the users, as the materials used for the packaging being 100% recycled.
We wanted to make it clear that there are two products and we used color palettes and graphic shapes to give a different feel between the packaging. For Cold Pressed Juice, we labeled matching our 3 main colors: Banana is Sunshine, Orange is Sunrise, and Strawberry is Sunset. We did this to create a metaphor based on the stages of the sun during the day.
We based the Fresh Milkshake categories on the moon and we used the 3 branded colors for each bottle cap category, but we added the Milk from our colour palette to establish this difference between the products and used the main colors for the metaphorical association, so Banana is Moonlight, Orange is New Moon and Strawberry is Full Moon.
We think that by doing this color association creates a relationship between our products and our users lifestyle.
We wanted to go a bit further than what we saw online. The idea was to give the user an experience of customization of the product, so they felt special, and create the feeling of a unique product because it was chosen like that by them.
As mentioned before the idea was to create a customized flow so the user can feel unique and they are in charge of creating their own product. In order to do this we created 1 main flow that divides in 2 flows depending on what the user prefers:
· Cold Pressed Juice
· Fresh Milkshake
The flows have been designed to create this feeling of customization on the user but restricting the choices they made on each step. This way we can make sure that what the user chooses makes sense and it’s not a messy product. Also the flow is only composed by 4 steps so we don’t loose the engagement of the user during this checkout process.
This project was a small proof of concept that served as an opportunity to explore the idea of creating a customized experience for the user without forgetting that this product needs to be "realistic" and would be impossible to create all the possible juice or milkshake combinations.
I loved investigating how to create a customized experience for the users and taking into consideration as well the fact that we live in a society where a product needs to be visually appealing.
Getting to the final proposal and the ideas that emerged after the first hypothesis were smooth and straightforward for me.
This was an interesting project to analyze the impact that a visually appealing product has on personas' eyes.
In terms of design, this project challenged us to create something that was visually appealing as well as functional, but with an extra focus on generating something that users felt was customized for & by them.
