The Grape App Design Challenge

Of wine tasting and technology

Sandro Cenni
Aug 25, 2017 · 9 min read

TL;DR

Because I have no patience to read all this stuff

Challenge: how can I help the wine-drinking millennial masses to…

  • … acquire basic wine tasting skills and user the correct aroma/flavour descriptors?
  • … build their own library of wines and relative tasting notes?
  • … compare notes with the Expert to learn a bit more about the wine in their glass?
  • … have fun in the process, on their own or socially?

Process: a good mix of Google Sprint and other Design Thinking tools like research, personas and empathy maps, assumptions, user stories and storyboards, flows and wireframes and a paper prototype, before low-, mid- and hi-fi wireframes are produced in Sketch and animated in Invision. Non-stop user testing, guerrilla testing, A/B (and at times C) testing with anyone unfortunate enough to pass by my desk.

Solution: got you interested? Skip right to the bottom to find out.

Experimenting with the logo

And now the long version with a glass of dry Riesling (try it if you have no idea what it tastes like).

Wine, Drinkers and I

Wine has been an interest of mine for quite a while, then I decided to do something about it, get some proper qualifications and, a few years later, this thing went from a simple hobby to an obsession.

I’m proud of my WSET Diploma; the final exam was by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.

But it wasn’t all sweat and tears! During the years of preparation, I had a unique opportunity of trying wines that I would NEVER be able to afford. Hundreds of professional tasting sessions of wines of all types and from all new as well as established regions — the New World vs the Old World, in wine terms — taught me to be discerning and descriptive about my wines.

Later on, when I started conducting tastings myself for groups big and small, I noticed very similar reactions from everyone involved: people listen to every word, they have Ah! moments when they smell or taste what I describe for them, they pay attention to things they never cared for before, like tannins or acidity, and they want to know more.

In short, they’re eager to learn how to appreciate wine and describe the aromas and flavours they detect to a level that goes beyond a simple ‘It’s white and it tastes like wine to me’.

Could this sort of thing be taught by an app?

The Challenge

Wine price/quality comparison apps are fairly popular and some of them use cutting edge technology, have huge databases with all sorts of information on all sorts of wines and have millions of users.

I put my UX design hat on and started looking into the wine app world.

All the apps I’ve found or read about focus on reviews and average prices. The ones I looked into also have a wealth of information on the producers, the grapes, wine-making methods and so forth, but this is contained in long, indigestible articles most people — as I found out later — tend to ignore.

Here’s my opportunity — I tought — I have some experience in e-learning, I have a lot of knowledge of wines, why don’t I combine the two and come up with an app that teaches the basics of wines and their grapes?

Quite vague, but it was a start. So, what’s the actual challenge? Watch this space…

What Problem Do I Want to Solve?

As this was a personal project and I did not have the benefit of a whole team of bright minds (or just minds in general), I decided to apply a mixed approach, taking inspiration from the Google Sprint (Day1: map / Day 2: sketch / Day 3: prototype / Day 4: decide / Day 5: test) and from Design Thinking principles.

What I like about the former is that on Day 2 of your project you can already have something concrete, based on your assumptions and while you’re still analysing the input from surveys and interviews, to show initial users for some very tangible feedback.

Question: what’s the one topic of the wine world you’d like to know more about?

Of the survey, the answer that determined the direction of my project was this one. People do want to know about wine regions, but they also want to be able to talk about wine, i.e., to describe its aromas and flavours.

The Challenge (again, but this time I define it)

That’s when I had the light-bulb moment of designing an app that walks you through a basic wine tasting session.

30 to 40-somethings with an interest in wine would be more adventurous in their choices, at home or socially, if they were given the basic tools and vocabulary to assess and describe what they have in the glass.

Any Competitors?

I checked out a bunch of apps, directly and indirectly on comparative articles & review sites: Vivino, Snooth, Delectable, Cellartracker, Wine-Searcher, Enosocial, Plonk, etc.

Some of these have implemented state-of-the-art technology, can scan and read labels, have huge databases. Vivino in particular stands out for the number of users, the size of its database and the wealth of information it contains on each recognised wine.

None did what I had in mind to design. So, great! No competition.

Demographic and User Personas

This app is intended for English-speaking 30–40-odd-year-olds with a margin of error of 5 years on both ends, wine drinkers who aren’t afraid of their mobile phones. I had iPhones in mind, since that’s what I’ve got and it’s a good starting point.

English-speaking millennials with some disposable income who have little knowledge of wine, but are curious to learn more, especially when it comes to describing aromas and flavours.

Enter my Persona:

Louise, 35 . DIGITAL, INFORMED, EXTROVERTED, HEALTHY, CURIOUS. Born and bred in Bristol, she lives there with her boyfriend. Marketing executive, enough disposable income not to watch every penny.

To empathise with Louise, I came up with a whole lot of behaviours, pains and gains, hopes and fears, which I’ll spare you, but they were useful to envision a potential user category and at least one use context: dinner party with friends

  • wine brought by the guests
  • everyone has a glass, food on the table
  • let’s do a fun game, wine tasting on The Grape App

Process Tools

To visualise, ideate, diverge and converge and finally come up with increasingly detailed decisions, I used a bunch of design thinking tools. Here are some pics, before I introduce you to the Tool to Rule Them All.

An initial one-pager on the app and some high-level flows. The idea evolved and both became largely irrelevant.
Louise’s Dinner Party: user journey, the app used in a social context
Wireframes. I was inspired by what I saw in wine apps and other apps

The Paper Prototype

The Tool to Rule Them All

On the same day I came up with initial wireframes, I also produced a partial prototype on paper, some sort of user flow I could use to pounce on people and get immediate feedback.

Paper prototype with OCR technology and an initial aroma/flavour categorisation

Taking a leaf out of existing wine apps, I thought character recognition of the label would allow a user to search for the wine in my ‘extensive database’ and retrieve an existing tasting note compiled by an expert (me).

The User’s Skeleton Happy Path

  • User scans the label on the bottle, the wine is recognised and a tasting note retrieved, but not shown to the user.
  • User is given quick tips (perhaps an intro video?) on what to do with the wine: look at it, smell it, sip it; then flowers, fruit and other categories are presented to the user.
  • User selects the detected aromas and flavours and ends up writing a tasting note.
  • App compares user’s note with expert’s and figures out % match.
  • % match is high, user is happy, as illustrated below in more detail in the User Flow.
User Flow: a representation of the happy path

Gone Digital

Logo and more wireframes

Moving on from paper was fairly straightforward, since the feedback from testers was that the idea could fly and they even started saying: “If you build it, I’ll buy it”.

I took it as the green light to proceed with my wine tasting app.

‘Grape’ is a very flexible word, it can take the place of similar words in many book or film titles, sayings, etc. Take for instance:

Grape Expectations…

The Planet of the Grapes…

Grape Britain…

And that’s how The Grape App was born. Why not. I’ve seen worse. Nobody complained, anyway.

It was 3am on a warm summer night when I woke up with an idea for a logo.

I could not go back to sleep, I had to jot it down. A quick sketch, then on to Sketch.

Again, nobody complained about it and here it is, at least a version of it.

The hardest choice might have been the font. In the end, after a few rounds of A/B tests, I settled for a Futura.

I did three big iterations of digital wireframes and a lot of minor ones, and practically every change was tested, A/B tested or merely inflicted upon anyone passing by for their opinion.

Here are some from the third iteration. Check me out in the short ‘educational’ video on how to swirl, look, sniff and slurp.

Third-iteration wireframes

A Solution

By now you must be at least on your second glass of Riesling. And final, I hope.

After much refining, checking latest trends, wriggling over font sizes and weights, images and colour schemes, here’s what I managed to produce as an MVP.

Features of the MVP

In the end, the design retained the following features:

  • OCR technology to scan the label and find the wine in the database
  • Short intro video and tips on how to conduct a tasting session
  • A structured walkthrough split into Appearance, Nose and Palate. These two are then further split into flower and fruit categories as well as other aromas and flavours
  • Each aroma/flavour category is illustrated by picture galleries showing the types of fruit, flowers & other stuff, just in case you’ve never seen a blackcurrant…
  • The nicely typed up tasting note at the end of the session
  • The comparison with the expert’s selection of descriptors for each category
  • A user profile with adjoined wine library

Et voilà the MVP.

Watch a very short video (no sound, just me doing the tasting thing). Then take a pic of the label and we should be so lucky if it really were Stags’ Leap…

Off you go, choose colour then consider aromas and flavours…

… and when you’re done, at some stage you’ll have to log in, if you want to retain your notes in your profile.

Results:

  • a professionally written tasting note
  • a comparison with the expert’s note (try that wine again)
  • a library of tasted wines
  • last but not least, hopefully, a lot of fun and happy memories

Fin. I hope you enjoyed your Riesling.

)

Sandro Cenni

Written by

Ironhack alumnus, UX/UI designer, wine ‘expert’ (me saying it, but I do have the WSET 4 Diploma...) http://sandrocenni.eu.

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