Delectable & Delivering Magic

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”
- Arthur C Clarke

Yesterday I read Fred Wilson’s post on Recognizing Wine Labels and it reminded me of the first time I used Delectable and had that a ha moment — they had broken through a large pack of wine apps and got the experience just right. I’m a wine neophyte, but I love wine, and aspire to learn more about it through tracking what I drink and enjoy. I’ve always believed in the promise that a wine app could capture and enrich my experience. I tried every wine app that had come on the market — from the time the app store opened until now, that numbered least a dozen. Once I tried Delectable, I realized they succeeded in finding an elegant solution to a complex problem that others had missed.

Looking back at that experience and what made me a loyal user of Delectable points to some key product lessons others can learn from. Namely, focusing on creating a magical experience for the user through creative problem solving.

It’s worth looking at the sizable challenge Delectable and their competitors faced in creating a valuable wine app. Unlike restaurants that have Yelp or Foursquare, there is no single, master, canonical database of all wines — and especially not one for wine labels. Therefore, every app had to build up their own database and naturally, most offloaded this work onto their users. This wasn’t easy work, as it required users to decipher wine labels (no easy task in most cases) and next, take the time to enter a seemingly endless array of data points about a wine, from price to terroir to grape to vintage. This created an incredible amount of work for the user. The result? Users gave up during the data entry process and thus not getting value out of the apps.

What Delectable did differently

The brilliance of what Delectable realized and subsequently built into their app was two fold.

First, and most importantly, they recognized that users didn’t actually need an immediate match in their database to have a great experience in recording their wine. Once they realized this, it opened up a whole new set of potential solutions for solving the harder problem which is capturing the information encoded in a wine label.

Second, they realized wine labels were incredibly complex and decoding them proved an almost impossible task with today’s OCR technology. Instead, they realized humans (through Mechanical Turk or similar services) were much better suited to capturing and inputting the information on a label while offloading it from the user capturing it via a simple picture.

Delectable’s approach is a brilliant example of a team re-thinking the problem they were trying to solve, and coming up with a magical solution that removed the friction from the end-user experience. The moral of this story is that technology isn’t always the right tool to use to solve a problem. When designing your experience, back up to understand the real problem your users want solved and then be open to creative ways to solve it for them.