With cocktail related searches recently reaching over 30 million a year, with a 20% year on year increase – Pernod Ricard tasked us to look at how they could provide a solution for this demand. Helping cocktail lovers find the perfect drink while increasing market share for the Pernod brands.
My role was to strategically and creatively lead the winning pitch. Putting together the team and providing guidance and oversight of the UX and UI throughout the whole project.
To create something different from the many recipe websites available, we needed a completely new platform. We needed to build a tool that would help anyone easily make professional level cocktails at home. Something that made the process as simple as chatting to a mixologist.
This led us to partner with Amazon, creating a voice-activated solution on the newest form of Alexa. The Echo Show with its touchscreen and voice commands was seen as the perfect kitchen accessory and was the ideal fit for our project.
To kick off the project, we conducted surveys and one-on-one interviews with multiple people in our target demographic. We asked each person to go through an interaction with us where they described and ordered a drink as if they were talking to a bartender. The research gave us a better idea of how people tend to ask for cocktails, what criteria they think about when doing so and enabled us to begin designing the dialog for What Cocktail.
We then entered an exploration phase to see what and how we could build with the Alexa device. Rapid prototyping was used to stress test different user scenarios, to see which interactions felt natural to the people using the skill.
Throughout the process, we held regular workshops with our Pernod clients, throwing ideas back and forth around the most relevant and innovative way to serve the content (which included thousands of different recipes), and help people discover new drinks.
We also worked closely with a team at Amazon, to continuously test, improve, and push the functionality of the Alexa device and the What Cocktail skill.
When cocktail-makers open the skill on their Amazon Echo, they are asked the same questions a bartender would ask a customer that doesn’t know which cocktail to have; “What’s your favourite spirit?” or “Would you like something sweet, strong, bitter or salty?”.
People can also find a drink based on how difficult it is to prepare, or what would suit a certain occasion, like a dinner party or BBQ. The skill uses each answer to refine and personalise results, and serve up the best suggestions.
Since November 2017, our skill has become an official launch partner of the Amazon Echo Show - and 7,000 users have enjoyed 185 different recipes over 13,000 times.
What’s more, as well as being Pernod Ricard UK’s first use of voice search, this project marks the beginning of an extensive and ongoing project to create data-driven experiences – increasing customer relevance for the multiple brands under the Pernod Ricard UK umbrella.