What Bartenders Taught Me About UX Research

During my second year as an undergraduate, my team worked with a bar near our campus. We began by interviewing the people around it and observing how customers chose what to order. I expected the project to be about designing a clearer menu. Instead, one customer’s question revealed a more interesting problem.

I usually order a lager with French fries, but I want to try the new brew. Will it pair well with my fries?

The customer was already curious. They did not need to be persuaded to try something new. They needed enough confidence to move away from a familiar choice.

At the time, I could not give them a clear recommendation. That uncertainty became one of the most useful findings in the project.

The Menu Behind the Menu

Our conversations with the bartenders showed us that customers were not the only people learning about new drinks. When a new cocktail or brew arrived, the bartenders also needed time and training before they felt ready to introduce it. They might consult the owner or read the latest product information the owner had provided.

This was not a failure of expertise. A changing menu creates a changing body of knowledge. The owner was often the source of that knowledge, while bartenders and part-time service staff had to absorb it before they could explain a drink to customers.

The timing made the challenge more visible. A new item generated the most curiosity when the staff were still becoming familiar with it. Customers wanted to ask questions at exactly the moment when confident answers were hardest to provide.

Before the interviews, I thought of a menu mainly as something for customers. After speaking with the staff, I began to see it as a shared source of knowledge. It could help customers explore while also helping the people responsible for guiding them.

From Product Facts to Customer Confidence

We designed the website after conducting the interviews. Rather than presenting only a list of available drinks, we created clearer introductions to the bar’s items. Information about flavor and alcohol level came from the bartenders’ knowledge.

Those facts were useful, but they did not answer every question a customer had. It was harder to turn ingredients into a story, suggest an appropriate food pairing, or describe who might enjoy a particular drink. Yet those were often the details people needed before choosing something unfamiliar.

This revealed a distinction that shaped our design:

• Product-centered information explains what a drink contains and how strong it is.
• Experience-centered guidance helps someone imagine how the drink will taste, what it might pair with, and whether it suits their preferences.

The website needed to connect these two forms of knowledge. Its purpose was not to replace a conversation with a bartender. It was to give customers and staff a clearer starting point for that conversation.

Learning Through the Bar

We produced a guide to help customers explore drinks and pairings, drawing on knowledge from the owner and service staff. But a well-written recommendation is not automatically a trustworthy one. The question about the new brew and French fries made that limitation clear.

We continued exploring the recommendations through informal conversations, interviews, and field observations. We also counted the combinations customers ordered. These methods gave us different views of the same experience: conversations helped us understand why people hesitated, observations showed how choices happened in context, and order counts showed what people selected in practice.

Customer feedback served two purposes. First, it helped us understand whether people wanted pairing guidance at all. Second, after customers tried different combinations, their responses helped us evaluate whether the guidance matched their experience.

This was exploratory field research, not a conclusive test of the best possible pairings. We could identify useful directions, but we still had to treat each recommendation as something that might change with more feedback. Clear presentation could make information easier to use; it could not make uncertain information true.

What the Bartenders Taught Me

This project changed how I understood UX research. Research was not only a way to collect customer requirements before building a website. It was a way to follow how knowledge moved through a service: from the owner, to the bartenders and part-time staff, and finally to the customer making a choice.

It also taught me to pay attention to frontline workers. If we had focused only on customers, we might have designed a more attractive digital menu without noticing the work required to keep its recommendations accurate. The staff’s experience showed us that the interface had to support learning as well as ordering.

Most importantly, I learned that good research does not always produce an immediate answer. Sometimes its value is in revealing where confidence ends and exploration must begin.

I began the project thinking we needed to design a better menu. I finished it understanding that we first needed to build better knowledge together.