Good Industrial Design (GIO) Winner 2016

#UX #Appliance #Prototypes #Awards

Personalizing your coffee so that it is just the way you like it is a central part of the coffee drinking experience, which is why I helped Douwe Egberts design this beautiful, award-winning coffee machine that allows users to tweak their drinks with precision, and to save their preferences so that they can enjoy their daily cup exactly the same way the next day, and every day.

Analysing the context

A series of workshops with the client were organized to understand the expected use of the coffee machines, the type of users that were being targeted, and the general vision of the product. We used use cycles and personas as a way to visualize our findings.

Coming up with ideas

The workshops were followed by internal brainstorm sessions in which individual solutions were discussed and mapped out in morphological charts. These were later used as a starting point to generate more coherent concepts for each of the features we had in mind.

Early screen mock-ups with an intermediate styling were created alongside interactive prototypes that helped us explore the implications of some of our designs. These also served as tools to better communicate our ideas with our client.

Prototyping and validating our ideas

I developed a mid-fidelity flash prototype which was embedded in a high-quality physical model of the new machine to test with users and demo the system with stakeholders. For this, I drafted a usability testing protocol, which was later carried out by an independent agency.

What the client had to say

“As the leader in full-service coffee solutions, JDE continues to innovate. We have found a perfect partner in design agency VanBerlo, with whom we have been working for more than 15 years. The design agency complements our knowledge perfectly, and always knows how to translate our briefings into the best design. That was done extremely well with the Promesso coffee machine: design and functionality are optimised down to the smallest detail. It’s not only a user-friendly product, thanks to the seamless collaboration of the JDE and VanBerlo team, this coffee machine compliments even the most stylish office interiors.”
Harrie Wessels
Global Design & Innovation Manager JDE Professional