Being a huge fan of craft beers, this project was really fun to do. For my study for the course Human Computer Interaction I teamed up with Stijn van Vilsteren and we created this Beer Recommender web app. The purpose of the assignment was, in a nutshell, to pick a ‘problem’ you encouter and make a product which is more ‘user-friendly’.
In this web app we wanted to make it easier for people who come to a craft beer bar, to make a dedicated choice. Often you can find in these bars big price lists on the wall with sometimes more than 50 beers listed. If you don’t know the beers and just want to try something different, you have really no clue what to choose. Using our app you have to make 4 simple choices based on the characteristics of the beer. Then the system will give you a recommendation based on these choices and you can order the beer at the bar.
The product is just a proof of concept and is therefore very minimal. It does only contain 16 beers so every combination (24) will result in one unique beer. The focus was on the usability and the user evaluations. The web app is designed to run on a tablet or a big touchscreen next to the bar. Therefore this web app does not work on mobiles or (really) small screens.
This web app is basically just a single webpage which contains all the data needed. All the interaction is taken care of by Javascript/jQuery. The database is an embedded JSON file. Because of this, the web app can run offline and is therefore completely portable (so a stable internet connection is not needed in the bar).
If you want to, you can try it out!