The Starbucks Coffee Maker is a concept for a  pod-based coffee system that brings the Starbucks experience home. Using pods in a variety of flavors and syrup/ingredient cartridges available at your local Starbucks, the coffee maker creates your favorite frou-frou drinks as you watch. The look of the device and its touchscreen interface match the Starbucks brand, and provides the user with the ability to build a custom beverage from the comfort of their own home. The interface allows anyone in the household to quickly and easily get their usual drink in the morning or build something more complex for a special occasion. It uses familiar Starbucks nomenclature and is both convenient and easy to use.

The Team

The Starbucks Coffee Maker is the result of a team effort to create a powerful coffee experience in the home. As part of the assignment, my team (Michelle Mederos, Eva Hoffman, and I) had two weeks to create a physical prototype and develop media showing the product's market placement. What you see is the resulting product and its a proposed advertising campaign.

The Process

We started by researching the current coffee maker market and examining the different types of coffee beans and coffee processes. We spent several hours observing people use their coffee makers at home and at the office, and interviewed dozens of people at local coffee shops. Our team discovered what they like and disliked about their coffee makers and shops, as well as why they drank coffee in the first place.

Insight and Point of View

We saw key aspects of the cafe experience that Starbucks had nailed, and that we could use the brand to bring elements of that experience home. There was a gap in the home coffee maker market we could use to our advantage.

Ideating and Prototyping

As we sketched out hundreds of ideas for the shape, interface and advertising campaign. Our aim was to make getting coffee at home as easy as ordering at Starbucks. We continually asked ourselves how we could make its form express the Starbucks brand.

Refining and Implementing

Our team build a final prototype and developed a presentation and pitch to show off the product, its interface and its advertising campaign. We demonstrated how easy it was to build a custom, complicated drink using the touchscreen and Starbucks own familiar vocabulary. We told the story of how the glass chamber allowed a person to watch their coffee being brewed on a wooden base reminiscent of the counter where a finished drink is placed. Afterwards, we received an A+ on the project.