Tap District

Product UX/UI Branding

A fully integrated sales, inventory, and delivery system for craft brewers, vinters and spirit makers.

ROLE

Guro Design

Principal

CONTRIBUTION

Product design
Prototype creation
Branding

OVERVIEW

Tap District gave me a chance to work in a few areas that I hadn't previously had experience with; consumables, inventory systems, and last mile delivery. Collaborating with former bus-dev and engineering co-workers allowed me to dive in and focus on design and product vision.

While providing a functional concept was the priority, we needed a logo quickly and incoporating the spigot mark into the typeform proved to be a quick win.

Disrupting the space doing triple duty

Offering a hollistic sales solution to craft beverage makers represented a unique challenge that bred some unique functionality. Rapid iteration spawned a clean aesthetic, moderate color usage and clever detailing.

Discovery & Purchase: Provision of a customizable B2B marketplace to showcase offerings to local clientle.
Order Management: Real time inventory management tying into and supporting sales, delivery and CRM systems.
Delivery & Fufillment: Delivery systems that include geolocation/mapping services, route efficiencies, and load checklists.

Discovery & Purchase

Selling alcohol-based beverages presents a unique challenge as there are a multitude of federal and state laws with significant variations across different jurisdictions. Our goal was to focus on craft makers selling in their local area. We had a relationship with Zilker Brewing in Austin, Texas that would serve as our geolocal launchpad.

The main storefront would showcase all the local sellers in the region, while each distinct seller would have a landing page that could be white labeled with custom branding. Sponsored placements on the homepage would allow for additional revenue streams.

Deeper in the site we would allow for white labeled storefronts that would allow vendors to market their goods directly to businesses.

In the details

SRM Values

One interesting product detail that I wanted to highlight was the color grading of the beverages. This would give buyers a visual cue as to what to expect from a beer and potentially wine or spirit. The SRM (Standard Reference Method) is a scale used to measure the color of beer. It ranges from 1 (pale straw) to 40 (black), and I created a swatch for each value to visually represent the range helping buyers further their understanding of color and flavor.

Order Management

Invoicing, inventory management, order logging and CRM functions were all part of the order management system. The goal was to create a unified system that would allow vendors to manage their business from end to end. With so many moving parts to account for it was important to maintain the pared down visual language that we defined with the storefront.

Orders would be itemized with color and shape coding to understand urgency and order status at a glance. Inventory levels would be visually represented to help vendors understand stock levels and potential shortages. Keeping businesses aware of their stock levels and sales charting with graphs would allow vendors to have a deeper understanding of market trend.

Delivery & Fufillment

We incorporated new technology to help vendors execute their deliveries; automatic route creation for efficiency, inventory stock per vehicle, stock checklists for truck loading, QR code scanning to finalize order fufillment. These were all product features I concepted on the fly while designing the baseline functionality.

Below you can find a prototype of the entire system from discovery to fufillment.