The Happiest Hour 

The Problem: Is there a better way to find happy hours around me than sifting through yelp and foursquare to find accurate happy hour info?
The Solution: A mobile application that lets users discover active happy hours in their area, filter for preferences, and contribute to a crowdsourced map of the best places in town for a couple drinks after work!
The Timeline: A short Sunday evening

Finding the right happy hours in your area should be easier than it currently is, so I set out to try to create a better experience for happy hour hunters out there.

The Process

I was able to put together a short interview guide and do a few quick interviews with potential users to understand people's utilization of happy hours, what they look for in happy hours, and the best ways to serve them that information. Some of the key findings here were:

• There is no current solution for finding a happy hour besides looking it up venue by venue
• Price is a large factor when classifying a venue as "ideal"
• Food options are just as important as drink options
• Late night happy hours can be just as important as normal ones

After gathering some preliminary research, I decided to hop into the design and layout of the first part of the app. Normally, I would advocate for a much lengthier research and discovery phase consisting of multiple research methods and more than just a few participants, but with my goal to get the first few screens of the app together by the end of the day, I chose to move on. A quick pen and paper sketch never fails to help get the ideas out there and think through user flows and needs!

For this project, I wanted to try out a prototyping tool I hadn't before, Adobe XD. I had heard plenty of things about it but never actually popped it open. I was able to pretty quickly define a color palette and create a few icons as featured over in the app to the right. Then was able to create a few different screens for the main "discovery" flow of the application. Overall, I appreciate how XD was pretty easy to pick up for someone used to Adobe, but it seems like the tool still lacks some pretty major functionality like non-triggered transitions to allow for the use of splash screens and stick nav items that don't have to be replicated across different artboards. Moving forward, I hope to be able to add the filter menu, the main menu, and a detail view for each of the list items where the user could see more about each venue's happy hour offerings. Give it a try and check back for updates as I continue to build this app out! 

Also check it out here and the design specs here