MY WORK / PRODUCT DESIGN / MIXERS ALEXA SKILL
A MAN TALKS INTO A BAR...
I've worked on a lot of both customer and consumer projects for Coca-Cola over 12 years. The Mixers Alexa Skill, a category first, was proactively born out of the opportunity to maximise the centralised drink data from the Mixers X Coca-Cola platform.
Ironically, this all happened over a large Gin and Tonic.
Creating the UX for an Alexa skill was challenging as the information structure is totally flat, opposite to how a traditional website structure might look for example. A user can simply say anything at any point and expect a useful response.
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The UX script writing and user flows were critical, along with (very) frequent user and functional testing.
I used a Miro board to lay out the experience from 3 primary starting points:
1/ Asking for a drink by name (e.g. "How do you make a...")
2/ Asking for drinks based on a spirit type, other ingredients and/or flavour notes (e.g. "Recommend me a fruity, fizzy, gin drink")
3/ Asking for a drink recommendation (e.g. "What drink is trending right now?")
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The skill would then inform the user (listener) of the ingredients and equipment needed. plus the method if required.
We created stimulus to replicate combinations of ingredients and flavour profiles to inspire users into making more challenging requests
The result? Over 200 cocktail and mixed drink recipes, delivering on a new touchpoint, to a new audience, all through service design thinking.
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UPDATE: A workflow to incorporate Voiceflow and Chat GPT-4 (with some training and content rules) would open up massive potential for more natural language response, better contextual understanding of the user input and many more drink/ingredient/flavour combinations. Watch this space... (not literally)