A set of coffee utensils that break the traditional form of cognition
In June 2023, also the third month of CKC's formal registration and establishment of the company, we received a commission from the core operation team of Corelle Brands Tableware Group (Corning Tableware) in China, hoping that we would design and develop a set of hand-made coffee appliances suitable for the domestic market for Corning's VISIONS brand.
(Statement: The video is taken by the entrusting party separately, and the copyright belongs to the entrusting party)
Corelle Brands, a household brand cluster originating from Corning Corporation (Fortune 500) in the United States, has inherited its 147-year special glass technology gene and transformed aerospace-grade materials into a table revolution. Relying on the parent company's advanced technologies such as optical fiber and gorilla glass, the Vitrelle three-layer glass lamination process was created to create laboratory-grade tableware that is 3 times more resistant to falling than porcelain and can withstand a temperature difference of 400 ℃. Its Corelle series of single products sold more than 0.75 billion pieces worldwide, covering 120 countries/regions, and more than 0.3 billion families listed them as "lifelong tableware". As an industry standard-setter, the product entered the LVMH hotel supply chain, 23 times won the red dot, iF design award, to "scientific visualization" aesthetics to reconstruct the kitchen ritual sense. The eco-cycle series, launched in 2021, will promote the global tableware ESG process with zero lead technology, laying the dominant position of the century-old giant in the high-end home market.
In 2023, China's freshly ground coffee market exceeded 60 billion yuan, with an annual growth rate of 28.6 percent (AI media data), far exceeding ready-to-drink and instant categories. As the core carrier of entry, the hand-washing appliance has become the first choice for the new consumer group "coffee ritual feeling" by virtue of its 100-yuan price (basic suit 150-200 yuan/advanced suit 300-500 yuan) and its low threshold characteristics of quick start in 3 minutes, and its advantages of multi-scene adaptation at home, camping and office.
The existing hand-brewed coffee utensils present a polarized situation. Most of the influential brand products except the low-priced styles are dedicated to creating a professional and precise operation process and subdivision control. Such logic can form a strong user & brand stickiness with professional enthusiast users, but it creates a high operation threshold and complicated practical operation process and matters needing attention, often let a lot of opponents to make coffee have a wait-and-see attitude of the junior enthusiasts discouraged.
We even went to Luckin, Cotti and other fast-track coffee stores in various cities during business trips to deal with other projects, and talked with many customers who bought coffee. When we mentioned "whether to consider making a cup of coffee by ourselves", we collected answers, "how to succeed with zero rollover" and "the sense of ceremony in the process" exceeded the subdivision flavor itself of the finished product.
Breaking the inherent impression of coffee hand brewing tools, while maintaining the light luxury and elegant tonality of Corning brand, we should fully consider the ease of use and differentiation of products, which we think is the main breakthrough point of this project.
How to trace the user strategy of Corning brand incoming coffee products?
Although the tableware under CorelleBrands presents high premium, high positioning and high quality users' mental cognition, in the specific project of creating coffee tools, it is obviously unreasonable and irresponsible to simply and roughly match the "high-level players" in the current stock of users: this kind of people often have very strong brand stickiness and a more "old school" product selection tendency, new products that break the inherent form of the product will cause them to question and reject them. However, following the regular product shape to create new products, the Corning tableware brand behind the product inevitably lacks user trust in front of the traditional professional head brand.
Coincidentally, the designers of our team, combined with the practical experience of hand-made coffee, just covered the proficiency gradient from small white to medium and high level. Therefore, we substituted the user's perspective and carried out a complete practical operation. We also summarized some pain points found by ourselves, and integrated a complete user journey map and some preliminary product improvement directions:
-Alternative coffee bean weighing method that does not require an electronic scale
-Optimize the grip center of gravity of the hand-made pot and adapt to female users-Improve the efficiency in the steaming process and enhance the flavor of coffee products
-Propose an alternative to the thermometer-Water flow control scheme with lower operating threshold
-Trap the waste liquid in the tail section to prevent contamination of the table top
-Enhance the decorative attributes of ornaments when the product is idle
With these preliminary directions, we respectively searched for a real user in the two groups of "professional users" and "daily enthusiasts" and conducted a more in-depth interview. We were very pleased to verify the rationality of many ideas and the popularity of users in the conversation, and at the same time, we also better polished some unreasonable ideas. Through interview validation and further polishing of some product opportunity points, we propose some interesting conceptual solutions
1. The thermometer function is integrated in the hand washing pot to visually quantify the change of water temperature;
2. A crazy and reasonable idea. Using the principle of old-fashioned lever weighing, a weighing fulcrum corresponding to the weight of commonly used coffee beans is added to the personal drinking cup;
3. Add an inclined scale on the hand-made pot to guide the user to control the water flow at the best angle, and pay more attention to the control of the amount of boiling water;
4. The improvement of the structure of the commonly used brewing products of tea sets, adding a valve that can control the on-off and size of the water flow under the filter cup, which is convenient and more intuitive to control the brewing effect easily;
5. More intuitive on-off valve filter bowl;
6. According to the principle of air tightness in physics, the hand pot is made into a valve-type air-tight structure. When the user presses the top switch, water can be discharged, and when the user lets go, the water flow is cut off by air pressure. Such a structure can facilitate the user to more accurately control the flow of water and intercept the flow;
7. Add a rain accessory above the filter cup to facilitate novice enthusiasts with weak water control ability to complete the brewing operation more easily;
8. Add a middle outlet on the basis of the integrated design product of the filter cup sharing pot, which is convenient for users to discharge the water remaining in the pot when wetting the filter paper before formally brewing coffee;
9. Elevated the bottom of the filter bowl through the lower decorative ring, so that the water outlet at the bottom of the filter bowl will not directly contact the desktop when it is placed on the desktop;
10. Change the holding mode of hand-made pot and sharing pot, and define the new form of the product with the comfortable holding size verified by coffee cup and thermos cup;
11, increase the filter cup cover to achieve dust prevention, steaming, tail waste liquid storage effect;
12. According to the flavor of different coffee beans, design different tasting cup types to create a multi-level tasting experience of smell and taste for users;
13. Consider the storage state of the cleaned utensils after the hand-washed tasting, give the product the use state of "inverted draining", and make the product cause through oblique direction, and reserve ventilation channels to prevent musty smell;
14, the whole point of flower work? Considering the diverse uses of the product, besides the purpose of brewing, can the filter cup be used as a juicing structure to provide users with a more novel fruit coffee experience?
15. Consider the visual hammer of the overall presentation of the product, breaking the inherent mental perception of past product forms. At the same time, the experiential concept of the steaming lid waste liquid cup is retained;
16, consider the form of product stacking combination, extended to outdoor carrying, idle storage and gift purposes and other scenes;
The value points that users pay attention to when purchasing coffee tools tend to vary significantly with their personal practical experience, while different purchase channels and potential gift incentives also contribute to very segmented product decision-making considerations. We propose four product definition ideas that match different target users, hoping to maximize the possibilities of the Corning brand in the coffee appliance market.
Small white user direction
One of the most worrying points for small white users is the risk of "overturning" in the control of water flow.
Therefore, in this scheme, we have simplified the two concepts of "smart pot" and "valve filter bowl" for the water flow control operation, which is highly dependent on "method.
Users can choose to control the on-off of the water flow by pressing the vent valve of the hand-made pot to prevent the wrong operation of too large flow, or they can choose to carry out fool-style brewing operation in the form of closed-valve stewing.
Professional User Direction
In this scheme, we draw lessons from the concept of "controllable flow rate filter cup" of DIY of some coffee experts, and take a set of desktop filter cup that can control the flow rate of water through the opening and closing angle of the valve as the core part of this set of products.
At the same time, the user can easily close the valve directly after the completion of the brewing, to prevent the end of the waste liquid contamination of the desktop.
At the hand-made pot, sharing pot and personal cup, we can store these accessories in an inverted form when they are idle through reasonable modeling details, which can facilitate the complete evaporation of water vapor in the container without falling dust and will not produce peculiar smell when they are used next time.
(This concept was even proudly named after the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which is indeed similar in story to that world-famous building.)
Online competition direction
The main communication and purchase channels of coffee appliances are online, and in the competition between online products, "visual hammer" is often the most critical factor. Therefore, around this motivation, we reconstruct the design language of this suit with the feature of "circle", and combine the real appeal of user experience to make this modeling feature fully reasonable.
The filter bowl showed absolute extreme differentiation in the market at that time in the form of "sphere". Matching with transparent sharing pot could make the product combination show "suspension feeling" and become the most unique identification element of this set of products.
We use different circular interspersing methods to design two styles of individual cups, the "expanding cup" and the "gathering cup", in which the "expanding cup" can gather the aroma of shallow baked beans more at the mouth of the cup, while the "gathering cup" can make the rich aroma of deep baked beans more intuitively release and fill the whole space, providing users with a richer level of olfactory and taste linkage experience.
Gift Purpose Direction
Apart from self-use, the purpose of gift is another considerable motivation for users to purchase coffee.
Therefore, in this possible direction, we have given more consideration to the ritual sense of still life aesthetics, including the display mode of products when users open the gift box and see the suit for the first time, and how to combine and place the products when they are idle. Therefore, we are more concerned with the stacking of the product in the non-use state, and how to create the uniqueness of the product in this subdivision scenario that the competition may not have paid attention.
After many discussions with Party A's client and common supply chain evaluation, we finally took Plan A as the focus of this project. Scheme A has the perfection of material, the maturity of structure and a high degree of visual differentiation. Before delivering the scheme, we further polished the user experience and packaged the selling points of the scheme around these three characteristics.
Identification Definition and Experience Optimization of Filter Bowl
In the design solution of the filter bowl, we retained the unique modeling element of "sphere" based on the first principle of visual hammer, and explored the selling point and rationality of user experience on this basis.
Although the spherical filter cup can bring excellent anti-scalding holding experience to users by using the excellent heat insulation of double-layer glass, it also gives rise to another problem: a complete sphere does not have a fixed and clear force point as a grip, which may make users slip off when grasping with wet hands,
Therefore, we combined the process of glass blowing to limit the maximum radius of the filter cup to design a ring of convex-shaped force handle, and this feature is also unexpectedly reflected with the sphere, with the story element of "star ring" becoming the finishing touch of the whole set of products;
In the scheme design stage, combined with our experience in the accuracy of blown glass, we think that we can not stick too much to the traditional filter bowl form of "launching speed" and other parameters in the design of filter bowl lines, but to express the permeability and surface properties of glass in a more differentiated way.
Therefore, we adopted a "double-spin bubble" feature to reshape the internal texture of the filter bowl with more exaggerated spiral lines and concave curved inner wall. We believe that combined with the permeability of the glass material, we can create a more interesting water flow effect when brewing.
Although this detailed plan unfortunately failed to advance to the actual landing, we still hope to share this interesting little thinking with you.
The dust cover of the filter cup, which constitutes a complete sphere, is used as a waste liquid collection cup in the use process, and has been widely praised in the subsequent user experience evaluation.
Break the traditional modeling cognitive hand pot
"Is the existing hand pot really easy to use?"
With this question in mind, our thinking runs through the whole project.
We later interviewed many female users (which is also the core user group of Corelle tableware) how they felt when using traditional hand-made pots. Nearly 70% of them mentioned the collapse of hand-made pots during the final low-speed water injection.
Therefore, when designing hand-made pots, we followed some objective mechanical principles:
1. Under the pre-condition of simulating the brewing angle, the moment arm between the holding point and the weight center of the pot should be shortened as much as possible. Thinking about this point leads us to finally finalize an inverted handle-when brewing, the user's hand can be more centered and centered than when using the regular hand to brew the pot, thus bearing less pressure of gravity on the wrist;
2. At the same time, we also put forward a concept: can the center of gravity of the hand-made pot be kept highly consistent at different water injection angles? This thinking also led to the specific characteristics of the spherical pot body and the "concentric grip"-both visually and theoretically, this is a feasible solution.
Create a personal cup for a multi-sensory experience
"Personal fragrance cup with double combination of smell and taste" is an extremely romantic scheme in our opinion. At the same time, we have made double-layer glass features in the part held by the user, and combined spherical elements to make it better integrated into the set.
Unfortunately, this concept, due to the more sensitive cost changes in the process, we abandoned this direction after many discussions in favor of a more stylized personal appreciation cup shape.
(The final landing of the personal appreciation cup and our other project case combination presentation)
The problems we found and fed back and the corresponding adjustment suggestions put forward have been adopted and promoted by the entrusting party. After more than three months of co-creation and half a year of follow-up, this set of products was listed at the 24-year Shenzhen Spring Gift Fair and received good market feedback.
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Great design
It is hard to see such details and humanized design thinking!
Great design, great article, just a little too many words, tattoo on the body is really a little painful.
Upper Grade
a very good set
this is good