Wine enthusiasts have various levels of expertise and experience. They are curious for new experiences related to the appreciation of wine but are too busy with their daily responsibilities to plan and seek out the perfect opportunities.
Goal: Create a user-centered app design that helps consumers locate social opportunities that meet their interest in wine.
Our goal was to better identify the segments of users that classify themselves as "wine enthusiasts" and understand pain-points in their current journeys to finding wine- related social activities.
We received 40 responses to our survey. Questions ranged from demographic information around age and income to specific questions around app usage, wine "enthusiast" level, and typical social activities with friends and families.
We conducted 17 in-person interviews. 6 interviews were conducted at local wineries during events and tastings. Interviewees named proximity of venue and discounts/promotions as very influential in their choice of winery visits.
We organized responses into clusters to better identify trends in user responses. Affinity mapping helped us create our core user personas; described in more detail below.
We created detailed personas and journey maps based on findings from our interviews and affinity maps. We identified three main types of wine enthusiasts, 1) Katie, the young professional looking for cheaper and more casual wine outings with friends, 2) Tracy, the time-crunched mother and wife looking for an occasional date-night spot with her husband, and 3) Todd, the wine connoisseur looking to sit-back and enjoy every wine opportunity he has with his wife and a few close friends.
During this process, we outlined a user flow based the customer journey maps we created from our interviews. After further interviews and feedback sessions with wine enthusiasts we began designing content and sketches of our minimum viable product.
