Overview
BrewMatch is a personalized coffee shop discovery app designed to bridge the gap between coffee enthusiasts and independent cafés. With the rise of specialty coffee culture and remote work, many users seek cafés that align with their ambiance, work style, and social needs—yet existing platforms primarily focus on ratings and proximity.
Our goal was to create a user-friendly platform that helps coffee lovers find cafés that match their unique preferences while supporting local businesses. Through personality-based recommendations and seamless event booking, BrewMatch fosters a stronger community coffee culture.
My contribution
Product management
User research
UI/UX design
The team
1 × product designer
1 × UI designer
1 × engineer
Year
Oct 2024 - Feb 2025
Process
Understanding the Problem
Traditional coffee shop discovery tools like Google Maps and Yelp focus on ratings but overlook personal experience factors like ambiance, work-friendliness, and social atmosphere. Our research showed that:
🏠 38% of Canadians prefer independent cafés over chain brands.
🧑🏼💻 65% of remote workers use cafés as a workspace.
💵 40% of Canadians are willing to pay more for specialty coffee.
This highlighted a demand for a more personalized approach to coffee shop discovery.
User Research & Early Insights
We conducted interviews at multiple Toronto cafés, speaking with students, professionals, and remote workers aged 21-58. The key takeaways shaped our approach:
🔹 Users seek cafés that align with their personality and work/social preferences.
🔹 Many want real-time updates on seating availability and café events.
🔹 Independent café owners need better tools to reach their target audience.
Based on these insights, we designed a personality quiz to match users with cafés that suit their style and introduced filters for ambiance, amenities, and work-friendly environments.
Design & Development
Our team consisted of one designer, one developer, and myself as the product manager. The development stack included HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL, enabling us to build a functional prototype with the following key features:
✅ Personality-based recommendations – Users take a quiz to match with cafés that suit their vibe.
✅ Filtering system – Search by distance, ambiance, menu, price range, and amenities.
✅ Event booking & reviews – Users can explore local café events and leave feedback.
We designed high-fidelity prototypes and tested them through user feedback. Users responded positively to the UI design, intuitive navigation, and creative personality-based approach.
Outcome
The BrewMatch prototype received positive feedback from over 20 users and 5 local cafe owners for its unique approach to café discovery. Key results included:
📝 85% of testers found the personality quiz engaging and helpful.
☕️ 78% of users stated they would prefer BrewMatch over generic review apps for café recommendations.
🤝🏻 Local café owners expressed interest in using BrewMatch for promotions and event bookings.
BrewMatch successfully demonstrated the potential of a community-driven coffee discovery experience by blending personalized recommendations with local business support.