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Masha Craft Beer
Date: 2026
Duration: 6 weeks
Role: UX/UI Designer
Project type: Case study
A mobile eCommerce experience for a craft beer brand that balances rich product discovery with speed and simplicity.
Masha is a mobile craft beer eCommerce app designed to provide a smooth and engaging shopping experience for busy first-time buyers. The project explored how user-centred design, structured navigation, and strong visual identity could reduce overwhelm within a complex product category while still maintaining the expressive personality associated with craft beer culture.
Through user research, personas, wireframing, and interface design, the project focused on creating a mobile-first experience that prioritised clarity, intuitive browsing, and confident decision-making. The final solution balances usability with visual storytelling, while also considering user values such as accessibility.
Background
Craft beer is a visually diverse product, often overwhelming users with choice, unfamiliar terminology, and inconsistent product presentation. Not only that, but there are so few eCommerce mobile apps dedicated to Craft beer compared to websites.
For a mobile app of this kind to be successful, it needs to have the best of both worlds - the rich product discovery of a website alongside the speed and convenience that a mobile app can provide.
Research
I explored existing alcoholic beverage apps and websites, ecommerce apps, and interviewed individuals who regularly use mobile apps for online shopping, in order to give me the best direction to tackle this challenge.
Competitive Analysis
Having looked at the existing market of alcoholic beverage websites in mobile view, it was immediately clear that there was room for improvement. Most designs were cluttered, tight, visually overwhelming, and fell short of accessibility standards.
However, there were some positives. Sites such as vaultcity.com highlighted blogs in order to educate and build customer trust on their products. Brewdog's site included a "Taste profile" section on the PDP which measured the different levels of taste for each product. While this was an informative element for the product page, there was no way to search for drinks based on these taste profiles.
User Interviews
To better understand user behaviours and expectations, unmoderated interviews were conducted with 5 participants who regularly use mobile apps for online shopping and occasionally purchase alcoholic products.
Key Insights
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Users often browse casually, but expect the purchasing process to feel quick and effortless once they decide to buy
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Clear visuals, concise product information, and accessible reviews help users feel more confident when purchasing unfamiliar products
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Participants expressed frustration when important product details were difficult to find or overly complicated
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4 out of 5 participants preferred interfaces that felt structured, familiar, and predictable rather than highly experimental.
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4 out of 5 participants associated purchasing alcohol with relaxation after a busy working day, highlighting the importance of creating a smooth, low-effort browsing experience
Define
To ensure my design was grounded in the needs of the potential customer, a user persona was created based on key insights from my research.
How can we....
Create a mobile craft beer shopping experience that helps busy first-time buyers quickly discover and confidently purchase products, while reducing overwhelm for the user?
Each section of the app was thoughtfully structured to guide users through a smooth and intuitive shopping journey.
Ideation
As this is going to be an ECommerce app, a lot of the pain points found on our persona can be remedied using ECommerce best practices: Hero banners, cross-selling, filtering and sorting, and flairs to let the user know what’s popular, on sale, or new. They key was to ensure that the experience felt welcoming, structured, and straightforward.
To align my solution with user needs, I first created a sitemap to ensure seamless navigation.
Next, I designed user flows that prioritised quick and clear navigational steps so that users can seek their desired product and purchase in a simplified manner, and also help users explore confidently before committing to a purchase:
For visual direction, I created a moodboard. This consists of existing webpages that sold beverages to get a feel for how they display their products. Other product pages included had a personalised flair to them, which I felt reflected the unique taste direction that craft beer is known for.
Design
With the app structure defined, I created wireframes of key pages to ensure clear navigation and an inviting feel. Prioritizing simplicity and usability, I then refined my designs into high fidelity screens, focusing on:
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Clean, accessible layouts for effortless browsing
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Colourful presentation that is welcoming
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Intuitive navigation for quick access to key information
Visual identity
Light green was used to communicate freshness, sustainability, and a calm browsing experience.
Purple was chosen to reflect the creativity and premium feel of craft beer culture while helping the app stand out with a modern, distinctive identity.
Logo: Rounded rectangular shape and bubbly typography, just like the craft beer and cans they’re kept in!
Font: Readex Pro was selected for its clarity and playful roundness, matching with other elements on the app.
UI Components: Colourful and rounded for comfort and approachability, all within a structured layout to make navigation engaging.
Maintaining the soft edges on other elements across the app, as well as a tagging system to assist categorisation, the blogs can deliver popups for customers to help push the business and social missions of the brand.
Testing and Iterations
To validate the design’s effectiveness, I conducted moderated usability tests with five participants. The goal: evaluate how easily users could navigate the app, complete key tasks, and their overall satisfaction.
Participants were asked to:
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Make a purchase through the Search function
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Make a purchase through the “Shop” menu
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Learn more about taste types using the blogs before adding a product to the bag.
All five participants successfully completed the tasks and praised the overall design. They noted the clarity and ease of navigation, with several highlighting how the app was very expressive, clean, and spacious.
However, there were still opportunities for improvement:
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4/5 participants expected to see a total directly below their price breakdown on the checkout, with 2 users also expressing the total shown on the bottom utility bar didn't stand out enough.
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3/5 participants felt the taste type popup window was excessive at times, when they only needed a short reminder on the taste type when viewing the product.
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2/5 participants suggested adding a sort function for the volume of the product, so customers can order by larger or smaller drinks.
Results
With an average rating of 4 / 5, Masha craft beer has successfully demonstrated that a focus on a clean, and welcoming presentation, coupled with a sensible approach to navigation, points of education to alleviate customer doubt, all working alongside ecommerce best practices, can help deliver a positive craft beer shopping experience on mobile.
Final thoughts
What I learned:
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I’ve learned how to apply a full UX process from research and personas through to wireframing and final UI design.
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Developed a stronger understanding of designing for specific user needs, particularly balancing engaging visuals with usability and efficiency.
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Improved skills in creating structured mobile eCommerce experiences that reduce cognitive load and support intuitive navigation.
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Strengthened understanding of visual hierarchy, colour psychology, and component design within a cohesive mobile interface system.
Next Steps:
Developing more personae would help broaden the appeal of this app and help me design this app effectively for a wider audience. I may be able to uncover more about user wants and needs for this type of app with a larger pool of users to interview. I would also like to have fleshed out the search feature to allow for users to search for content found in blogs, so that they may look up and learn about certain terminology or find out more about the brand's activities.
What I’m proud of:
I’m particularly pleased that I was able to design an interface that feels engaging and modern while still remaining intuitive and accessible for first-time users. As someone that doesn't drink, this was a unique challenge to learn about why people enjoy the product, and tailor a digital experience to them. This was a demonstration of effective research and user empathy, executed by careful design intuition.