CASE STUDY · CONSTELLATION BRANDS

Constellation Brands Ambassador

An internal mobile app that helps employees learn, find and share the company’s 100+ brands.

Role
UX/UI Designer
Team
UX Manager, UX Designers
Timeline
5 weeks
Platform
Mobile
Tools
Sketch, Adobe XD, InVision

The challenge

Employees were passionate about the brands but couldn’t easily find product information in the existing CRM. Search meant digging through vendor or store records, and stipend tracking was confusing.

Project outcomes

  • A focused MVP of Search & Filter, Event Shaker and My Shelf, refined through user testing
  • Product-first search instead of store-by-store hunting
  • A research-backed backlog, including a stipend tracker for later

Role and responsibilities

What I owned

Research

  • Stakeholder and SME interviews
  • Employee interviews across departments
  • Competitive analysis of social and beverage apps

Synthesis

  • Affinity and journey mapping
  • Rose, Thorn, Bud prioritization
  • Design principles to guide decisions

Design & Testing

  • Wireframed four concepts
  • Tested wireframes with users
  • Converged on hi-fi MVP mockups

User research

Know more, drink more, sell more.

Interviews with employees across Constellation Brands departments surfaced four consistent pain points.

Low awarenessMany employees didn’t know the app existed
Knowledge gapsMost reps specialized in one of beer, wine or spirits
Cumbersome searchFinding products meant navigating vendors or stores
Stipend confusionHard to track the annual product allowance
“Well, I have to search, and I have to click on each store to see if the store carries it.”
— Constellation Brands employee

Synthesis

Three themes, four concepts

Affinity mapping, journey mapping and Rose, Thorn, Bud turned interviews into three themes that set feature priorities.

Brand educationWine pairings, cocktail recipes and ratings history.
Brand loyaltyPurchase tracking and easy repurchasing of favorites.
Search limitationsBetter portfolio filtering and content-specific search.

Design decisions

How I drove it

KEY DECISION 01

Search around products, not stores

What I did. Designed structured search and filtering by category and content type, so employees can go straight to a product.

Why it mattered. Employees previously had to click into each store just to see whether it carried a product.

KEY DECISION 02

Make brand loyalty personal

What I did. Designed My Shelf, where employees collect favorite products and share them with their networks.

Why it mattered. “There should be an easy way to create a record of which wine I like, so I can easily share it with friends.”

KEY DECISION 03

Prioritize the MVP, park the rest

What I did. Converged on Search & Filter, Event Shaker and My Shelf for the MVP and put the Allowance Tracker on hold.

Why it mattered. In hindsight, a smaller exploration of the tracker could have been worth it. Employees were clearly interested.

Reflection

Final thoughts

Employees had very different levels of understanding of the Ambassador program, and that honest feedback steered us toward education and discovery. Making events like tastings and festivals easier to find is still an opportunity worth exploring.