Overview
BrewGene helps people find their next beer. You rate the beers you’ve tried, and the more you rate, the better its recommendations get — a beer review service that had already built its audience on the web. In September 2015 I was brought in to design the BrewGene mobile app, crafting a modern design and app architecture for one of the largest and most popular beer review apps, on both iOS and Android.
From website to app
The website already had the core pieces: beer ratings, a Top 100, friends’ activity, and personalized recommendations. The job was to turn that into an app people would open at the bar. I organized it around a five-tab bar — Home, Search, Places, Cellar, and Friends — with rating always one tap away in the header.
Discover. Home leads with a Beer of the Day and the current Top 100 leader. Every beer gets its own page with its style, ABV and IBU, a star rating, tasting notes, and quick actions: having one now, add to watch list, recommend to a friend, find it nearby, and “people also like.”
Your beers. The Cellar keeps every beer you’ve rated, the Watch List holds the ones you want to try, and Recommendations turns your ratings into suggestions — the heart of what makes BrewGene different.
Out in the world. Beer Buddies finds friends by username, email, or address book. Nearby Places lists bars and breweries around you, and each bar gets its own page with whether it’s open now, its beer menu, recent beers, and a quick way to call or visit.
Design and handoff
I designed the interface in Photoshop and Sketch, refining it across several rounds between September 2015 and early 2016. Every screen went to the BrewGene team as a fully layered artboard, with an exported asset kit — headers, backgrounds, tab bar and action icons at 1x, 2x, and 3x — ready for their team to carry into development.
