Our connected home brewing kit

We thought of a project : a home-brewing kit connected to an app that link all beer lovers to experience with a DIY beer and that would link them trough the same interest. It will be a connected home brewing kit.
phone

To go beyond these researches, we found that it would be interesting to get the definition of the concepts that were in the problem that we had to solve. Here is what we found :

Career Guidance Experience : This is representing the different type of guidance counseling that one can find concerning its career. It can be to start a new business, to follow a certain reconversion, to enter on a market, or it could be for someone who conducts two activities at the same time. These guidance experience can be found on the Internet. There are different types of platform for it : videos, forums, websites, paying services, etc. The counseling can also be provided by a professional : a licensed professional, a counseling cabinet, etc.

Beer Lovers : Beer lovers are people who enjoy the beverage of beer in all its forms. They can consume it everywhere (at home, at bars, at concerts/festivals, etc). They can enjoy all the types of beer from all around the world. The are fine knowers of beers, thanks to personal research, personal experience and:or article and videos that can be found on the internet.

Mobile App : Mobile Apps are of course well known in today’s world. The apps that we can find on our phone are replacing websites and are providing new services in a new way. There are different types of Apps (Native App, Hybride App and Web-site based App). They are developed and distributed to be commercialized.

Our project

With all of these information, we though of a project that would combine all of these ideas : a home-brewing kit connected to an app that link all beer lovers to experience with a DIY beer and that would link them through the same interest. It will be a connected home brewing kit.

As said before, it will be connected to the App that we will develop. There will be recipes, tips, and explanation to help use the brewing kit that the consumer will buy. There is also some sort of forum on the App that connects the community of every person that bought the kit. In this forum, people will help each other and share their experience to improve the skills of everyone very easily (for exemple, one can answer the question of someone else to help him brew his own beer).

There will also be meetings organized by the developers of the app. These will gather people that have the same level in the brewing process. They will be able to practice together and to meet professional brewers to help them improve with their advice.

Our MindMaps

How did we get to this idea ? Thanks to useful tools like MindMeister, we managed to explore deeply and to find what we needed to make our project a reality. To begin with our researches and documentation, we all created our own mind map around this subject and we came up with different results. Here are our mind maps :
Avi's MindMap
Zoubida's MindMap
Jean's MindMap
Jie's MindMap
Loréna's MindMap
MindMap1 These mind-maps helped us to get to know the subject a little bit more and to explore all the ideas behind each concept of the problematic.

Project Definition

To go beyond these researches, we found that it would be interesting to get the definition of the concepts that were in the problem that we had to solve. Here is what we found :

Career Guidance Experience : This is representing the different type of guidance counseling that one can find concerning its career. It can be to start a new business, to follow a certain reconversion, to enter on a market, or it could be for someone who conducts two activities at the same time. These guidance experience can be found on the Internet. There are different types of platform for it : videos, forums, websites, paying services, etc. The counseling can also be provided by a professional : a licensed professional, a counseling cabinet, etc.

Beer Lovers : Beer lovers are people who enjoy the beverage of beer in all its forms. They can consume it everywhere (at home, at bars, at concerts/festivals, etc). They can enjoy all the types of beer from all around the world. The are fine knowers of beers, thanks to personal research, personal experience and:or article and videos that can be found on the internet.

Mobile App : Mobile Apps are of course well known in today’s world. The apps that we can find on our phone are replacing websites and are providing new services in a new way. There are different types of Apps (Native App, Hybride App and Web-site based App). They are developed and distributed to be commercialized.

Our Project : With all of these information, we though of a project that would combine all of these ideas : a home-brewing kit connected to an app that link all beer lovers to experience with a DIY beer and that would link them through the same interest.

It will be a connected home brewing kit. As said before, it will be connected to the App that we will develop. There will be recipes, tips, and explanation to help use the brewing kit that the consumer will buy. There is also some sort of forum on the App that connects the community of every person that bought the kit. In this forum, people will help each other and share their experience to improve the skills of everyone very easily (for exemple, one can answer the question of someone else to help him brew his own beer).

There will also be meetings organized by the developers of the app. These will gather people that have the same level in the brewing process. They will be able to practice together and to meet professional brewers to help them improve with their advice.



User tests

Once we all agreed on the details of our ideas, we decided to develop a study on potentially interested users. Here are the questions that we asked :

General information related to the topic
Q1 : What do you think of our product ?
Q2 : Would you be interested in it ?
Q3 : How much would you be willing to pay for it ?

About your habits…
Q4 : Do you drink alcohool ?
Q5 : Do you frequently drink beers ?
Q6 : Would you say beer is the alcohool that you consume the most ?

About our product and service…
Q7 : Do you like making your own products ?
Q8 : Do you like gathering with people around a beer ?
Q9 : Would you consider our application to meet new people ?

Constructive suggestions for improvement
Q10 : How do you think we could improve our prototype ?

Thanks to the answers that we got from this survey, we got a general point of vue that was nearly the same for everyone and that we have summarized onto these ideas :
- People were very attracted to the idea of creating there own beer
- They were all extremely excited and enthousiastic about the forum part of our app. The idea of having help from other people and create a community around the same interest was a very goof point in our idea.
- They think we should use AI to help on the Research Bar to have an automatic researcher.
- They didn’t find a great interest in the part of our app that explain how to use the brewing kit as it is already explained on the « instruction to use ».
Exemple of one of the feedbacks that we had :

Our Mockups

    iphone1 iphone2 iphone3
    What does our app look like ?
    Our app is designed to be practical and simple for the user to use. The different functionalities in it will help our consumer to find all the help that he needs, will encourage him to share with the community and will allow him to have an amazing user experience.

    Technological Requirement :
    To design and to make our app work, here are the technological systems that we will be using :
    - Support of iOS and Android systems
    - The development of Artificial Intelligence in terms of Data Analysis to make our customers needs link and to propose an automatic research feature.
    - The development of a technological communication to help people discuss and create a sort of forum where they’ll help each other.


    Target :
    We defined our core target as clients in the range of age between 25 and 40 years old. In fact, even if our product and app can be used by anyone over 18, we think that our defined core target is the one that will be the most likely to use our app and the features that it offers. Moreover, people between 25 and 40 are also the ones that enjoy the most craft beers over industrial ones.

    Benchmarking
    By doing some research, we found out that there is no direct competition to our application. In fact, we are the first ones to implant ourselves into this market with an idea of featuring an app to our product.

    However, there is definitely some indirect competition. Here are a few similar products :

    - Brooklyn Brew Shop : https://urlz.fr/bjSe
    This company propose a homemade beer kit to produce a Blond Beer. It is the same idea that we have which is to create a starter pack to anyone who'd like to create his own beer.

    - Norhtern Brewer : https://urlz.fr/bjSl
    This company offers a product that is the same of ours. The difference is that this product doesn't have the service that our app propose.

    There is also an indirect competition concerning the « advice » part of our app. This competition is simply the forums that one can find on the web such as :
    - One of the most famous forum on beers that you can find on the Internet : https://www.beeradvocate.com/community/
    - A forum for beginners in brewing : https://www.homebrewtalk.com/forum/forums/beginners-beer-brewing-forum.39/


Our identity

Here are some few images of our identity. See this as a sort of mood board for our application :