UX/UI Design
Jacobs Douwe Egberts
Lead Designer & Project lead
Defining the experience starting points
DE specializes in high-throughput Coffee machines for the business and hospitality market. Their latest innovation was an improved brewing process that produced a beautiful layer of rich crema. So they decided that this justified a premium product line that was in need of a flagship product
VanBerlo had been DE´s Industrial Design partner for a long time and would be supplying the Industrial Design. And to underline the premium nature, the user experience was to get center stage.
After careful consideration we chose two experience starting points. The ingredients would be the hero and should be highly visible in the user interface. And the product needed to have a hero interaction. Something that would put a smile on peoples face, something that people want to show to others.
Following initial idea generation and investigation, we discovered a unique double-walled glass coffee cup design that not only maintains the warmth of your coffee but also showcases the full richness of its contents.
This inspired the foundation of our user interface approach, and it proved successful. The design enabled us to display various coffee blends in vivid cross-sections, enticing users and offering a clear representation of their order. Moreover, this approach facilitated direct interaction with the ingredients through the user interface. We had found our Hero experience.
Making it real
Now we had to make our concept reality. We laboured on creating all the visual components to make the experience work and closesy collaborated with internal embedded software developers at DE in order to squeeze the last drop of UX out of affordable hardware. Compromises had to be made, but in the end, the things that really mattered stood firm.
This resulted in an award-winning product and a patented Hero experience. Not only has it withstood the test of time, but it has served as a blueprint for a vast number of competitor offerings up until today.