Grounding baristas in Starbucks Stories

Creative Direction, Creative Strategy, Writing, UX Consulting for POP

As the world’s most recognizable café, Starbucks has a steep challenge: to share their passion for coffee craft alongside a consistently great brew, no matter the location or time of day. In order to achieve experience consistency, we partnered with Starbucks to reignite and reinforce coffee expertise amongst their diverse staff. Our Tasting app is designed to appeal to an internal audience ranging from the summer student Barista to the veteran Coffee Master. Created from the ground up, we started with the insight that “coffee has memory”—because every bean has its unique origin story, and because people create memories over sips of the brew.

We created a way to make coffee tasting an enjoyable part of a daily routine, while delivering important educational and practical features including a brewing guide, tasting journal and coffee timer. Inspired by the physical coffee records of one of their 20-year Partners, we brought a tactile, journal-like aesthetic to the functional and instructional experience. We worked closely with the Starbucks Coffee Leadership team to identify and prioritize features, and to create this v1.0 of the app.