Designed a Low-Cost Service for a High-End Jazz Bar
Con Alma · B2C Service Designer & Team Lead · August 2025 – December 2025
Photos taken from Con Alma's website.
I led a client-facing service design project for Con Alma, a high-end Pittsburgh jazz bar, serving as team lead, product manager, project manager, and service designer. I set the project direction, managed the timeline and team workload, led on-site research and stakeholder interviews, and designed the final artifacts we presented.
PROBLEM:
To grow beyond Con Alma's current customer base without diluting its brand
SOLUTION:
Created physical keepsake cards paired with Polaroid photos to create an elevated celebration for special occasions.
Expanding Beyond a Narrow Customer Base
Photos taken from TripAdvisor and Instagram conalmapgh @downtown_design
Con Alma is a well-known Pittsburgh jazz bar with a strong identity: live jazz music, a high-end atmosphere, and a loyal audience that values both. However, that same identity also creates limits.
Con Alma's customer base is relatively narrow. Many guests come specifically for jazz, while others are comfortable paying for a more expensive night out. In a tighter economy, that made it harder to attract a broader audience—those who are not particular about jazz and are more selective about spending.
In other words, the challenge was to find a way to widen Con Alma's appeal without compromising what made it special.
Finding Opportunity On Site
Before choosing a direction, we spent time in Con Alma observing how the business operated at both high and low demand across its hours. We conducted on-site research, informally talked to guests, gathered feedback from staff, and interviewed our clients, the business owners of Con Alma.
Our research made one thing clear: any idea had to fit Con Alma’s existing operations. Our stakeholders wanted to:
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Preserve Con Alma’s image: they did not want a solution that felt cheap, gimmicky, or difficult for staff to carry out, and
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Have big impact with little investment: The business did not have the budget or appetite for something heavy or complicated.
Across our fieldwork at Con Alma, two types of guests stood out in particular.
The Birthday Girls
On several visits, we noticed groups of younger guests celebrating a special occasion. They were dressed up, took lots of photos with the musicians, and talked about how nice it felt to splurge once in a while.
The Older Couple
We also talked to a retired couple that now spend their time traveling around the U.S. together. They met because of jazz, stumbled into Con Alma that night, and mentioned how lovely it would be to celebrate their upcoming anniversary there.
Apart from Con Alma’s regulars, and the guests who were already likely to come for the music, these two groups felt like the clearest opportunity for broadening the customer base, not only because of how representative they were, but also because of the one thing they had in common: a desire to feel special.
The Need To Feel Special
From our competitive analysis, we found that many high-end restaurants make special occasions feel more memorable through small but intentional accommodations.
Further research and stakeholder conversations showed that Con Alma already marked certain occasions in small ways, such as putting out flowers for proposals. But that level of attention was not consistent across all celebrations, and it was especially unlikely for walk-in guests.
That led us to a more specific question: how could Con Alma celebrate important moments in a way that felt intimate yet sophisticated? And more importantly, what is something only Con Alma could provide?
The most obvious answer was the live music.
Unlike other restaurants, Con Alma has live jazz nearly every night. It felt like the one part of the experience that no competitor could easily replicate, so we saw it as the strongest opportunity to make birthdays, anniversaries, and proposals feel truly distinctive.
So for our first stakeholder presentation, we proposed “Celebrate,” a new feature in their reservation feature that would let guests note special occasions in advance and request a song as part of the experience. To keep it realistic, we prototyped the flow within Tock, Con Alma’s existing reservation system, with a seven-day advance requirement for custom song requests.
Service Design Blueprint
