Hey Barista

DISCOVERING 'HEY BARISTA' - Promoting better coffee consumption

Specialty coffee production is linked to specific regions, encouraging the prosperity of local communities and businesses. In contrast with regular coffee, it identifies with traceability, authenticity, and, most importantly, sustainability. That’s why it’s so relevant to promote it in as many ways as possible. 

Hey Barista began as an annual print magazine by the world-famous oat milk company Oatly. It was their way to highlight specialty coffee consumption and engage with coffee lovers, sharing stories about their “passions, musings, and more.”

Sometime later, Hey Barista evolved into an online publication, and last year, we joined forces with the Oatly team to elevate it into an app that lets users find the best cafés in town, curated by coffee-obsessed experts, as well as access to the latest baristas' stories from the online magazine. A new and engaging way to encourage specialty coffee drinking.

UI DESIGN - An app with extra creaminess

Roughly, the main goal of the Hey Barista app is to serve coffee lovers by listing the best cafés in town and being able to geolocalize them on the map. These lists are not just any lists. They are carefully curated by an expert barista in each city, who you can get to know by checking their profiles also on the app.

Oatly entrusted us with the app design and gave us tons of creative freedom. The only premise Oatly set was to follow the brand guidelines of the Hey Barista publication. This branding is impactful, with solid colors and a magnificent use of typography. We automatically fell in love with it, taking advantage of its vibes for the look & feel of the app. 

We started by composing a moodboard with loads of refreshing interactions. We wanted to give a twist to how the maps are usually shown, make it more original, and not stick to the typical integration with Google Maps.

Hey Barista's UI is pretty effective, with three sections: Discover, Stories, and Profile. Our main challenge was meeting accessibility and navigation standards while keeping their distinctive ‘underground style.’ We faced the dilemma of whether to use the remarkable vertical navigation and strikethrough in the selections they employ on the online publication.  Even though those are not the most accessible of the patterns, we decided to give it a go and maintain these branding elements, locating ‘Discover’, the main section of the app and the most used, in the lower left corner of the screen, which is also the handiest.

We incorporated other beautiful details into the app, such as handwriting effects on maps, delightful iterations, and fun error and loading screens. We also took advantage of the Hey Barista branding in an interactive way. We played with the screens that are usually relegated to the merely functional, such as the loading and error screens, making them more fun.

PRODUCT BUILD - Coordinating development and marketing efforts

Oatly was preparing the Hey Barista launch marketing campaign while we were finishing developing the app. We had to ensure the product was tested and working perfectly to submit it to the stores for approval with enough time.

We committed to developing the Hey Barista app within this tight deadline, and we succeeded thanks to fluid and constant communication with the Oatly team, with whom we had to synchronize to adapt the design and prioritize functionalities.

Regarding technologies, we used Django for the backend and React Native for the frontend. Both development teams worked side by side, maintaining impeccable daily coordination to ensure that the V1 came out on time and bug-proof.

PRODUCT LAUNCH - What’s next?

With 6K+ downloads in the first month after its launch, Hey Barista is receiving so much positive feedback. People compliment the look and feel and how helpful it is to discover new coffee spots.

We've truly enjoyed this project, not only in terms of design and development but also in terms of working with Oatly, whose mission of making it easy for people to live healthier lives without recklessly taxing the planet’s resources resonates so deeply with us.

It has been a true partnership in action, the way we love to craft digital products, ideating and building side-by-side, and trusting in each other. And the fact is that we are still working together, coming up with new features to amplify the app’s scope and feeling that caffeine excitement about the future to come. In the meantime… Enjoy your [coffee] app ;-)