Scannelier

Interviews

I designed, conducted and analysed a semi-structured qualitative interview to explore the concept and understand why the target group buys and drinks wine.

I targeted people between 30 and 40 years old who drink wine occasionally. I recruited five participants whose interviews were conducted individually and remotely (due to the COVID-19 social distancing).

Insight I found this tool essential to reach a higher level of empathy with users. I had to be genuinely curious and detached from any assumption and designer role. Although there’s a high risk of confirmation bias, Thematic Analysis helped to deliver most of the expected insights from the research plan:

• Most participants feel a strong social influence when drinking wine. This affects many of the stages involved, from choosing, to buying, and the entire context of consuming it. Wine, like many other alcoholic beverages, is considered a treat for oneself or for special occasions.
• Although pairing (drinking wine while having a meal) is a frequent practice in most participants, they recognize that they don’t know how to do it as well as they would like.
• The lack of knowledge on how to choose wine can be frustrating and confusing. Most participants end up making random, superficial or “safe” choices just to get it done.
• Almost every participant thinks they have a busy lifestyle. Their time investment is restricted to family, work and social matters.

Survey

I conducted this survey with twenty participants, who answered multiple-choice and open-ended questions. This type of quantitative research helped me validate results (triangulation) by collecting objective and subjective data from participants, which are equally valuable.

I confirmed some insights and dropped assumptions about how this group chooses and consumes wine:

• Wine consumption happens casually, but a common scenario is as a complement for meals. Again, most consumers do not know how to make a good wine-food pairing.
• Almost every consumer buys their own wine, at a grocery store, and more than one bottle per occasion. Though, they usually don’t know which wine they want or need.
• Most volunteers believe that they would enjoy more and increase wine consumption if they had a guide or knowledge on how to buy and consume the product better.

Affinity diagrams

I used this tool as a bridge between the empathize and define stages, as with it I synthesized the previously analyzed data. I grouped related concepts together, identified key themes and distilled interesting behaviours for personas and initial user journey maps.

I tagged key concepts (!) that I found of great value and needed to be represented in the definition of the user. From simple demographics (mid 30’s married men and women) to interesting contradictions (willing to learn more about wine, but not having the time) are important lessons that helped me to build a credible and real image that represents these users.

Personas

I decided to have primary and secondary personas. The primary (Carolina) represents most users’ goals, while the secondary (Diego), although shares many of them, has slightly different motivations and methods of achieving those same goals.

Carolina has some conservative traits, yet she’s a strong and decided woman that appreciates the joys of life and the people around her. Diego is quite expressive and casual, which combined with a strong sense of practicality, makes him appreciate the available tools that technology provides. These personas brought me closer to walk in my user’s shoes.

Empathy maps

This is a clean statement of what the participants said, did, thought and felt (during the interviews), which I brought into the personas as the user’s voice. My final product must keep present these concepts, as they represent the personas in a nutshell.

Insight Carolina represents most of the participants on how they acquire (at supermarkets) and consume (with family and friends, while having meals and special occasions). The strong social influence and disposition to learn are clear motivators shared with Diego. However, both have short patience regarding tasks that consume their precious time. I reached a better understanding of the what, how and why participants choose and drink the wine they do.

User Journey Maps

I used this tool to examine the main touchpoints and channels that users are currently interacting with when buying wine. These journey maps were also intended to help me visualize and understand the context of interaction in which my product is expected to perform.

I was able to identify the patterns of behaviour and emotions developed through time together with the pain points. Both personas share an emotional curve, beginning and ending happy. But issues appear in the middle of the process, where the lack of confidence, shortage of time/patience, and confusion arise. This happened, in the most part, when the users faced with the dilemma of choosing the right wine. Here is when I spotted opportunities to define the root problem.

As a personal preference, I tend to write the opportunities and ideas to improve as how might we questions, so I can eventually revisit and improve.

Point of View

This is the cusp of definition! I wanted to define a point of view (or problem statement, or design challenge) to have a goal oriented project to reach my users, satisfy their needs and acknowledge the collected insights.

Insight A busy person needs to choose a wine according to his/her taste, food and social preferences, because he/she wants to buy better and tastier wine for itself and guests while investing as little time and effort as possible.

The POV itself was the best insight. There is nothing else to say, besides that I printed this phrase and pasted it next to my screen. This truly defined the problem I wished to solve.

How Might We Questions

I wanted to tease my way to the Ideation stage through HMW questions. I looked back to the User Journey Maps where I generated preliminary versions of these questions.

Then, a safe choice to kick-off the Ideation phase is Brainstorming, however, I was on my own in this project. So I decided to critically assess through HMW answers how others have solved the problem and identify opportunities. Vivino is an amazing website and mobile app that helps users “Discover the Right Wine”.

Insight Vivino is a robust product that almost answered all of my HMW questions. This may seem very convenient for some, but I do not agree with the swiss army knife approach. Having solutions to every different problem made me believe that Vivino’s app suffers from featuritis in its effort to bring too many functionalities to users. Besides, my users didn’t have the time to browse and learn all the features this app has. The context of use told me that they need a fast, straightforward solution. However, the app’s wine scanner was a very interesting reference to consider.

SCAMPER

I decided to use the SCAMPER method on Vivino to generate thoughts that sparked innovation from it. This was a good idea since other popular competitor apps offered similar functionalities (but in a less mature and attractive way).

Insight After analyzing Vivino, I collected a bunch of ideas to design a product that caters to my users:

• I can learn user’s taste profile by asking their preference of flavours in other types of food.
• Use a bottle label scanner to identify wines fast, but keep a search field to type in the brand and type of the wine.
• Don’t include social features, but make use of “safety in numbers” concept.
• Use a Wizard pattern to keep user focused on fast and easy steps towards their goal. Keep in mind Hick’s law.

Challenge Assumptions

I have collected a few ideas from the SCAMPER exercise, but they felt a bit ethereal. I decided to make a brief challenge assumptions session to mature and generate more ideas.

This exercise not only gave me the opportunity to mature ideas, it also brought new ones from problems I didn’t realize. It also pointed out areas where I need expert advice in order to provide accessible and credible user experience.

Now, Wow, How Matrix

To this point, I have amassed a significant amount of ideas which needed to be filtered and categorised (convergent stage). If I was working on a team and with UCD methodology I would have used a more thorough tool (like design maps, use cases, user stories, and even then card sorting), for the current purpose this one did the job just fine.

I collected a reasonable balance between normal and original ideas. Also, the great majority of them can be implemented without extraordinary effort. The exception to the latter are ideas 4 and 16, which require the collaboration of and work with external companies/organisations. Idea 10 is alone in the “necessary” category as it proposes something that’s not original (more like a standard) but will require external assets too (usability expert testing, accessibility testing, etc.).

At this point, it was enough idea generation. The ones I have mapped work as a checklist ready to be sketched and test how well they look and work together in the next phase.

Storyboarding

The ideas I previously created needed to get stirred and put into a simulated realistic context based on what I learnt from user research. I used storyboarding to visualize how my primary persona would use some of the ideas I generated in the previous phase. This helped me get into the sketch mood necessary for fast and cheap low-fidelity prototyping.

Insight Storyboarding helped me ground the ideas I have been developing and even come up with a few more. I was able to identify the importance and overview how each feature unfolds within the product.

User Flowcharts

I could have used this tool before doing a storyboard, but I needed to sketch and visualize my user in the real context. Now, the objective of these flowcharts was to map the tasks in a coherent and fluent order.

Insight Having a better understanding of these tasks and flows helped me understand how each screen must focus to provide intuitive affordances. It was a good first step towards building the conceptual model for this app.

Low Fidelity Prototypes

I'm still working on this phase and soon will post my latest progress. Please come back in a couple of weeks.