Final Worksheet

Step 1 - Develop Your Idea

Kiss is a new malt beverage aimed at young women who like sweet, fruity drinks but aren't ready to start throwing down sorbet-flavored vodka or mixing their own cosmopolitans. Fruity, fun, and sweet, this 5% alcohol beverage comes in three different flavors, original, strawberry, and peach, and brings the fun without the headache the next day.

The goal of this website is to introduce this new product, convey its aesthetic and purpose to visitors to the website, direct them to places where they can buy Kiss, and convince them that Kiss is the best beverage to have at their next get-together.

Step 2 - Discovery and Research

I visited different websites for different kinds of alcohol, from high-end to novelty. Overall, it was difficult to find websites that were equally invested in creating an "experience" of the product in their web design as they were with simply conveying the relevant information.I split the different alcohols whose websites I researched into four categories: expensive, mid-priced, liquer, craft/local, malt, and female-targeted.

Expensive Alcohol

Expensive alcohols tended to have websites that were big on the "flash" (not necessarily actually using Flash itself, although some did), but were not as easy to use as is the standard for many websites today. Glutted with tricks and flourishes, they took time to load, were tiresome to navigate, and often did not even particularly reflect the brand's name or aesthetic. The Dom Perignon website is a particularly egregious example of this, in my opinion. Instead of looking sleek and interactive, it seems more concerned with its own impressiveness than with providing a good user experience.

Mid-Priced Alcohol

Mid-priced alcohol websites tended to have much more information-- in fact, maybe too much. Although they used beautiful images and some interesting layouts, because brands tended to have more sub-brands and varieties, their websites focused on a) conveying as much information about their different offerings as possible, and b) selling said offerings. Smirnoff, Absolut, and Francis Ford Coppola Wineries, with their myriad options, are all good examples of this. While fairly interesting, they can come off as mercenary and with the amount of aggressive promoting the brands appear to be doing on their own websites. The glut of information offered can also be daunting.

Heineken, although it doesn't have the in-brand variety that Smirnoff and Absolut have, also follows this model.

Liqueurs

Liqueurs had some of the best websites I visited and provided much of the inspiration for Kiss's website. Rather than including interactivity for the sake of seeming clever, these websites combined interactivity and information in a way that informed and delighted the viewer and added to the user experience. Kahlua, especially, was a delight to peruse and encouraged the viewer to click through the website and learn more, instead of paralyzing them with information as Smirnoff's did.

It must be noted that not all liqueur websites were as successful as Kahlua's; Grand Marnier's website is notably clumsier. However, it makes a valiant effort to achieve the same ends Kahlua does.

Craft Alcohol

Craft alcohols were, on the whole, clean and easy to peruse, although they tended to be more minimalist and typographical than liquer websites, and lacked the same sense of fun and adventure. Ippon Matsu beer, a locally-produced beer with limited availability, has one of the best websites in this category: an elegant website that is easy to navigate and invites exploration. It's not quite as interesting as Kahlua's website, although it makes a valiant attempt.

Generally speaking, however, most of these websites, so concerned with minimalism, tend to be more boring than anything else.