The Anti-App
Design lead for New Belgium, 2013
Strategy:
People spend more time on their phones than on the people at the table. New Belgium wanted to be on the side of the table. The bet was an app that needs no attention.
Design:
Pick a personality and a timeframe. Beer Mode posts on your behalf and vaguely replies to your friends while you drink. Wood and brass over a pint-glass gradient, at the height of flat design.
Leadership:
Made Movement held the seat. I was the design lead, directing the product experience and every screen. 40 percent of people who opened it posted to Facebook and looked at a beer.
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.
Product in Hand
Set the dial, face down.
Select Persona: Concerned, Industrious, a face from a fifties catalogue. Set Time on a brass gauge. Beer Mode Active, and a countdown over a glass of amber. The menu animates each beer's real IBU and ABV.
Product in Life
Ninety minutes, unbothered.
Pick Concerned, set ninety minutes and put the phone face down on the bar. It posts a paragraph about the home office under your name and answers your cousin. You drink the beer.
Screens
Product in Culture
The brewery has a stake in the hour.
Every bar table has a phone face up on it, and the feed wins the hour that used to belong to the people sitting there. A brewery sells that hour. It has a stake in who wins it.
Position:
Lead designer at Made Movement
Services:
Research, Strategy, Design
Partner:
New Belgium
Status:
Launched, 2013