Meet the challenge:

May-July, 2016

Amadeus Brewery is a craft brewery in Siberia. They make a wide range of beer styles from traditional German to edgy and experimental. They pride themselves on using natural ingredients and brewing with passion. The brewery has already established its reputation among local people and the brand awareness is quite high. The owners recognized the need for a website a while ago, it worked well, but they felt that their online experience could be made better. The business goals were to make information about beers easily accessible and give the brewery an overall friendly digital image.

My process:

I started meeting with the owners of the brewery – they are very passionate about their beers and they want to share that passion with other beer-lovers as well as provide clear information about beer styles. The owners pointed out that they felt important to have the history of the brewery and a small explanation about the brewing process on the website for the people new to the beer culture. The problem was - they were uncertain who current visitors of their website were.

Discovery

I conducted a quick audit of the brand’s online presence and found some potential pain points. The website did not rank high on Google Russia due to a problem with keywords, which called for action.

After that, I studied Google analytics to see who and when uses the website and what the problem areas seem to be. The duration of the session looked a bit short to me at first – eventually during user testing it turned out that that was just enough time for people to find what they wanted and leave the website.

I examined feedback messages left on the website – most of the people sending them turned out to be business owners – running bars or shops, who wanted to do business with the brewery. This was the first and very important cluster of site visitors. I researched sales analytics of the brewery to get more insight into existing business clients and their profiles.

I spent some time doing field research at the brewery brand shop as well as at the bars with Amadeus beer, and observed customers. Surprisingly many women liked the beer upon trying it on recommendation from their husbands. This was an interesting cluster to research – were they interested in knowing more about the beer they liked or not?

In the shops I came across another popular buyer persona – young people who regularly try out new craft beers, so they buy completely unknown stuff alongside with the trusted labels (which includes Amadeus for the locals). Another point to research – where do they get information about the latest brews? Website, shop, social media?

After conducting interviews, user personas were created.

Redefining the Goals

Following another session of discussions with the brewery owners and staff members, goals were redefined. First of all, the website should have clear information for potential B2B clients.

Secondly, it should provide an easy search for beer styles, so that people who tried a beer at a bar and only remember the label, for example, can find what they want and discover more styles similar to what they like. As for the third persona - it was decided to create a newsletter doubling with an Instagram post to keep the most loyal customers updated on the new brews. Doing that via the website was discarded as an unnecessary measure, since some of the brews are limited editions/seasonal or experimental and may not become part of the permanent merchandise. (Through the interviews we have found out that young hip people prefer getting information via social media appearing directly on their feed, they do not like checking the website often).

User Testing

I conducted a series of user testing to see how the users interacted with the website. They were given a set of simple tasks – such as contacting the brewery or finding a beer assuming they only know the name and how the label looks. The pain points were finding the website itself, as it was way below beer blogs and big beer-rating websites.

Another pain point was that while younger people used English names, older people gravitated towards spelling even English names in Russian, which complicated Google search, as the keywords were different from the actual search terms.

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User Testing Take Aways

In general, users could easily perform the tasks as soon as they figured out how to get to the website and were delighted to find branded products and pictures. Sending a message was easy but the feedback that it was sent was hard to notice.

Taking into consideration all the information gathered through user testing and working together with the developer, changes were made to the website.

Results

Google ranking went up, the website became easier to find for both Russian and non-Russian speakers. The traffic of new users went up, with a number of loyal customers signing up to the newsletter growing. Digital brewery experience for ‘beer newbies’ as well as industry professionals became better - which could be gathered through more constructive B2B propositions coming through the website as well as positive feedback messages left on the website.