Wine Breakers

Socializing and Wine Tasting

Client: Total Wine & More

Duration: 3 months

Project Type: solo project, UX/UI design

Client Overview: Total Wine & More is America's Wine Superstore, the country‘s largest independent retailer of fine wine. They are exploring ways to leverage digital to enhance the overall tasting experience.

Prompt: Create a fun wine tasting survey tool for casual social drinkers to socialize and capture their wine preferences.

Wine tasting and socializing are overwhelming and difficult, these barriers need to be removed between people to make the experience fun and inclusive.

Tech and Tastings

What is the problem?

Product tastings are generally pretty low-tech and don’t leverage digital well to enhance the event experience. Information about what is being sampled and the attendees’ notes are either communicated verbally or via paper/pencil so there’s a high risk of being forgotten or lost once the event is over.

Millennials

Wine is perceived as intimidating among new wine drinkers, millennials, and Generation Z mostly because the marketing is focused on taking notes and points, instead of any sense of fun. Generally speaking, millennials think of wine as a social drink, a connector that is meant to be shared.

Persona

Suzy likes to invite friends over and wants to try more wines with them. She likes the idea of having a variety to select from and comparing people’s favorites. Suzy and her friends gather biweekly to try a new bottle of wine.

Key Insights

"How can I remember important information about the wine?"

"How can I learn about what my specific tastes are?"

"I want to taste first and discover what the flavor is by myself."

Wine Breakers is an ice breaker that brings people together for their love of wine to help spark a conversation and enhance their tasting experience.

1. Hassle-free experience

Putting surveys in between people and the tasks they want to accomplish, making their survey experience as painless as possible.

2. Giving the user control

Allow users to be in charge of what they taste and feel about the wine tasted based on color, aroma, taste, price, and pairings.

Step 1. The party code

Easy step-by-step instructions and single focus tasks allow users to socialize without having to rely too heavily on learning how to play. If you're a host share the room code.

Step 2. Warm-Up Question

Add a personalized question to help spark conversation between people who find it hard to socialize in person.

Step 3. Break the ice

Get to know the people at the party by answering few questions added by each member. Get answers to your question at the end of the round – read funny ones and laugh out loud!

Step 4. Analyze the wine

Fun card game allows you to select the most appropriate answer for the question. Questions based on 5 factors of the wine – color, aroma, taste, price, and pairings.

Step by step walkthrough

User Flow

This is a walkthrough of the steps involved for a user to initiate the gameplay, play the rounds and check results.

Asking the How Might We questions

HMW make customers take the survey in a fun and easy way?

HMW make customers capture feedback and finish the survey?

HMW design ways for everyone to participate?

HMW design for inclusivity in an experience with a sense of belonging?

HMW design ways for everyone to participate to take the survey in a fun and easy way?

HMW remove barriers between people and allow them to take the survey in an inclusive way?

Competitive Analysis

I compared and analyzed a few interactive games and few apps related to digitizing wine/food tasting and analyzed them in terms of workflow, information design, and presentation method.

Conclusion

Wine Breakers is an engaging interactive game that breaks the ice between people, gamifying the survey-taking process, and generates an evaluation of the wine being tasted. This data helps them to understand which wine is popular amongst their group of friends. The label can pull stores where the wine can be bought.

Takeaways and learnings

Challenges

Being a beginner in wine tasting, I had a lot to learn. This happened to be my first UX project which pushed me to conduct my own primary research.

What I would do better

My focus solely lied on designing the playing experience. I would want to clean up the report generation and explore more in-depth UI trade-offs.

If I had more time

I would want to test out my prototype on users and see how it is received and improve upon it. Create an interactive prototype with a narrative flow of my solution.

Open to work, get in touch! senjalp30@gmail.com