Vind
An iPad app that helps you organize and keep track of your wine collection.
Macguire Rintoul, Emily Cheung and I designed this app to help users keep track of how many bottles of each varietal they have in their collection, as well as to remind them of the cost of each wine and when they are expiring. Catered to casual drinkers ages 30-50 in a home setting who frequently enjoy sharing a glass of wine with family and friends.
Vind is designed for the iPad Mini. We wanted to provide an experience for a device that has a place at home but is still portable, has a fair amount of screen space to work with, and is a device that, in many homes, family members share. (77% of our interviewees stated that they collect wine with a partner.)
Demo Video
Persona
In order to further empathize with the needs of our (imaginary) users, and decide what features we needed to include, we imagined who one of our users might be. We put out a survey on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/wine/comments/79culs/wine_collector_research_design_project/) and sent out a questionnaire to wine-collecting friends and family, and gathered general information about the demographic of wine collectors. Based on our data, the pieces fell into place, and Zameel was born.
Zameel is a real-estate agent, who maintains a mid-sized collection with his wife. While Zameel loves wine, he considers himself a casual drinker, as opposed to an enthusiast or a sommelier. Zameel uses Vind when he’s in the kitchen or on the couch, to select bottles to open for special dinners, and to bring to dinner parties.
Experience Map
We created an experience map describing the journey of a user in an example of an anticipated interaction flow. It breaks down what the user is thinking, feeling, and doing, and what the app is doing, at each phase in the experience. This helps us to illustrate the pain points of a user, as well as to foster empathy for our users in context, to help us simulate their needs and motivations.
The Features
The four main features of Vind are the Collection Manager, which is an organized representation of your collection, History, which is a log of all user activity, Notifications, which is a hub for pertinent information about your wines, and Search, which allows you to easily search the entire app for specific information.
Collection Manager
The collection manager allows users to maintain and browse their collections, and organizes wine into smart-categories. Zameel uses the collection manager to easily find a bottle of wine. Whether he’s looking for a bottle within a certain price range, for a specific varietal, or for a wine he has recently purchased, he can quickly scroll through the categories, and pursue the most efficient way to find that wine. When designing this page, we interviewed potential users and showed them sketches of various interface designs and ways of approaching this screen. Our users preferred variations of the interface that provided shortcuts to specific subsets of their collection.
If you were to tap on the "See All" link in the Varietal category header, you would see the following screen (shown below on the left), where all the varietals in your cellar are listed in grid view. If you were to tap on a varietal, you would see a detail-view of that wine in your collection.
History
History is a log of all of a user’s activity within Vind. If Zameel’s friend asks him which wines he brought to her last dinner party, he can use the History feature to remind himself which wines they were. He can then swipe right on the item to share the activity with his friend, to let her know which wines they were along with relevant details. When we asked interviewees what they struggle with in maintaining their current wine collection, one participant responded, “Remembering what is in storage and what has been drunk.” The history feature is the answer to this problem, providing a simple way to check whether you have removed a wine from your collection.
Notifications
Notifications is our way of keeping users informed about their collection. During our qualitative study, one participant noted that their greatest struggle with collecting wine is remembering “when [the] best before date [is,] or [when] to hold [a wine] until.” We designed this feature such that users will be notified when their wines are reaching their peak drinking age, are expiring, or have expired, based on the dates they put into the system when they first added the wine.
There is also the option to add notifications in two ways. The first way is to add a custom notification for unique wine-related events. Zameel might want to add a notification to check the prices of the wines at a specific vineyard that has an annual promotion. He can even ask the system to notify him 3 weeks in advance, so that he remembers not to buy too many regular-priced wines in the weeks before the sale.
The second way to add notifications is by subscribing to a winery. Zameel and his wife like to spend a few weeks in Napa Valley every Summer, and Zameel subscribes to wineries near where they are staying. That way, he and his wife can stay in the know about wine-tastings, wine releases and other events these wineries decide to share through Vind. 56% of our participants stated that they purchase their wine partially or solely from wineries. These users would likely appreciate a notification letting them know that the latest wine from their favourite vineyard has been released.
