I was responsible for designing the entire iOS app, Rails website for internal use, as well as creating Illustrations that went into the website, app, and marketing mediums. I also helped create the overall brand image for the company and helped in the design of their marketing site. Here is some insight into the work that I created and how I came up with the solutions that I did.

 

 

August 2014 - July 2015

 

 

Illustration, Branding, iOS Design, Web Design, Art Direction

The idea of 12oz is to bring an unlimited coffee subscription to those that love coffee for one low, monthly price. 12oz partners with local coffee shops to allow users to use their simple app to pay at coffee shops. Coffee shops take down a 4 digit code at the time of order, and 12oz reimburses the coffee shop fully each month.

 

 

After recently being hired by a firm back in 2014 in Nashville, Tennessee called Vrasa owned by Jordan Halvorsen, he immediately brought me on to be the lead designer of his new startup idea, 12oz. Jordan was the Product Lead for 12oz so I did all of the design work and we would discuss what we felt was working and what wasn’t. This was usually every two weeks or so. All they had so far were some initial branding and some basic wireframes (shown below).

 

 

Competition
After recently being hired by a firm back in 2014 in Nashville, Tennessee called Vrasa owned by Jordan Halvorsen, he immediately brought me on to be the lead designer of his new startup idea, 12oz. Jordan was the Product Lead for 12oz so I did all of the design work and we would discuss what we felt was working and what wasn’t. This was usually every two weeks or so. All they had so far were some initial branding and some basic wireframes (shown below).

 

Market
Although 12oz would be based in Nashville at first, limiting our market to only the type of people in Nashville would inhibit 12oz in the long run. At first I felt the need to focus on consumers between the ages of 18–30 but when I found out we would have to change our price model to be higher, a lot of the people I asked in this age group said they wouldn’t pay the $70 a month for the base price subscription. This makes sense because a lot of this market was still in college or just out of college and things like student loans and bills were much more important to pay.

 

Because of the feedback received from asking people in this age group, I decided to shift the main focus to early adopters in the 30–45 age group. This would target those that usually choose to do one of the following throughout their day: grabbing coffee in the morning before a long work day, meeting someone for business at a coffee shop and having the ability to buy them a coffee, working long days at coffee shops and wanting a few coffees throughout the day, catching up on work with a coffee after hours, along with other possibilities that I feel fit the age group best. Of course, there are going to be consumers outside of this initial target, and I believe the situations can definitely be applied to others, including students or younger/older coffee lovers.

 

Coffee Shops
Knowing coffee shops was a big part of the project because of the nature of our app. Making things simple for coffee shops was just as important as making things simple for consumers. Knowing the needs of coffee shops and being able to create a company that would help and grow shops we believed in was an important part of the 12oz culture. We had 3 main points that were brought up to coffee shops to show how our product could help their local businesses.

 

1. The idea of unlimited coffee would make customers stay longer. Staying longer would then lead to things such as ordering food, inviting friends, coffee exploration, and build customer trust. 

2. 12oz created new customers. Users of 12oz that did not initially know of certain coffee shops were introduced to exploring new places knowing they would be able to grab a fresh cup of coffee there.

3. The technology gave them leverage over competition. 

 

 

Going back to design, with the wireframes I had I wanted to get a feel for how I wanted the app to look now that I had the general UX laid out. (These were chosen before iPhone 6 in 2014, keep that in mind.) I wanted to use a bit more color than I am used to and I really enjoyed the color scheme of the bottom left picture as you will see throughout the app.

 

We launched a private beta to 100 users in Nashville in order to see what we could refine before going public.There were a few issues we received after the beta in terms of UX and although I cannot show every problem for privacy reasons, I’d like to highlight one I had to fix before launch (the other two shown on left are being fixed in version 2.0). On the redeem screen there was no way for the barista to see the type of drink the user ordered when writing down the redeem code, which is a crucial part of our established workflow. Because the barista has to take down a code at redeem, knowing the price of the transaction they wrote down served as a way for the shop to track finances. Sometimes users would forget exactly what coffee they had pressed if they are having small talk or something so it was a highly requested feature from both beta testers and coffee shops. My solution can be seen on the right (before the user presses redeem, still leaving room for illustrations).

 

Creating the icon for the app was a super fun part of this project. I already had it set in my mind to create a coffee cup for the icon, the problem was choosing a style. I went through a few early iterations of a face on coffee icon but all of them felt too weak or too plain (see below).

Of course I didn’t want to have a distracting icon, but I also wanted to create something inviting that users would want to open and also give that small design detail to the app. I ended up creating a top view of a coffee cup and it felt perfect. Where do coffee drinkers look at their coffee from? The top. It only made sense. After I created the icon, something still felt a little off so I added shadows for depth and a little bit more realism while still maintaining the characteristic illustration style that I love. I tried a few colors for the background but ended up deciding on a light grey (see below).

 

More for internal use, the Rails website I designed lets coffee shops keep track of the transactions that have come through with the 12oz app and stay on top of how much 12oz owes them. On the other hand, it also allows for the 12oz team to also stay on top of what they owe coffee shops. Coffee names and prices can also be changed and are directly fed into the app without any need for users to update. Pretty great huh? 

 

For the design of this site I decided to go with a side menu that allowed easy access to all parts of the site and was also able to use the rest of the screen real estate to portray data and tables and still incorporate some gorgeous typography all tied together with a minimal gold, grey, and white color palette.

Obviously I cannot show actual data in this case but I’d like to show a few of the final screen designs with some placeholder data. 

 

In addition to Interface and Experience Design, I also created a vast amount of collateral for the brand such as posters, illustrations, stickers, billboards, and marketing tools. Here are some of the works I created. Captions for each in order:

 

1. 8 of Almost 50 Illustrations Used for Marketing, Website, and Collateral
2. Left: Promotional Stickers, Right: Stickers to Put in Windows of Supporting Shops
3. Launch Posters to Hang in Coffee Shops to Raise Awareness

 

I decided to leave the marketing website for last because I had the least involvement in this part of the project. The rest of the project that you read above I was the 95% of it but this part Jordan Halvorsen took care of. I did some revisions of the site and some advising but the majority of the design was Jordan through use of my illustrations and color choices I showed above. You can see the site live here.

 

 

The launch for version 1.0 went really well! People were in love with the application and the entire culture and brand behind 12oz. The app was featured in The Tennessean (read here!) on the day after release and we were also featured on Product Hunt (see here!). We had an overwhelming amount of consistent sign ups for the first few weeks and were able to get a ton of feedback that we filtered through as features for 2.0 or changes that needed to be immediate.