Clink: The Newest cocktail app

The Clink App generates unique drink recipes from ingredients you have at home. All you have to do is fill out our quick “MAKE A COCKTAIL’ quiz with all of the ingredients you have at your home and Clink will curate a unique cocktail for you in seconds. Clink also offers a Tool Glossary, Database of Classic Cocktails, a blog, and a “my favorites” section. 

The target audience for Clink is for persons 21+, foodies wanting new drinks, or newly 21 users who want to find their niche drink of choice. 

challenge

Design an app of your choice that can be marketable to your generation. Outline competitors, create a user flow, and display the journey of how your app works.

Design Goals

• Create a platform to educate users on different drink recipes

• Allow users to have the ability to favorite and collect recipes they enjoy

• Design a blog where users can interact and also share their favorite concoctions and good food pairings

• Include a database of classic cocktails

• Build a glossary for common tools used for creating and mixing drinks

site map & User Flow

A site map and user flow was created to establish the functionality of the app and display how our users would navigate our application landscape. The sitemap helped my team and I see all parts of our app. In the user flow, the user can pursue a multitude of actions, but two important functionalities I wanted to highlight is how the user would generate a cocktail recipe and how to use the blog platform.

competitive analysis

In our research, we found that there were no cocktail generator apps on the market. Currently present are food randomizer apps and an online platform that generate cocktails from ingredients you input. With no active competitors, we feel strongly that Clink will thrive and be a hit amongst our target audience.

feature highlight

The blog is a place where our users come to engage and connect with one another. It’s a place where you can share articles about drinks you and your friends made for one of your themed parties or share videos on how to make your favorite concoction. On the blog page, users can explore a plethora of articles, filter content by popular categories, and save articles to their reading list to name a few. Clink is more than finding your drink of choice – it’s about building community.

Inspiration & Branding Identity

Our design inspiration was Art Deco with an air of modernity. Art Deco enveloped American culture in the 1920s and 1930s – the same time period as the Prohibition Era – marking a redistribution wealth, a frivolous lifestyle, and the roaring 20s. The artistic movement consists of geometric shapes, symmetry, and bold and metallic colors.

My team and I created an Art Deco moodboard – pulling out overlapping colors and established our color scheme. Since we were designing an app platform we toned down some of the more bold and bright colors, and settled for a pastel palette that still held true to the nature of Art Deco.

design system

In our group, as we continued to design and establish a brand identity, it was pertinent that we created a design system. The design system was created to help us clearly identify elements to maintain consistency across pages and agility in terms of how quick we were able to produce on a tight deadline.

Learnings & takeaways

1. Establishing a visual identity and having a solid design system is essential as you’re building a new platform to maintain consistency and agility 

2. Divvying up the work by strengths can greatly benefit your workflow

3. Laying the groundwork (wireframing and user flows) first will give you a greater sense of the framework you want to build

Credit: Sydney Henry, Hannah Jablonski, Claire Jones, and Leah Hottenstein