Spirit of 21 App

UX Design, User Task Stories, User flow, Wireframes

TL;DR

The Spirit of 21 team needed help defining the MVP of the app's initial release of Spirit of 21. This new mobile app was meant to enhance the wine tasting experience, facilitate wine purchases from partnering wineries, and connect small and mid-sized wineries with wine lovers.
My task was to help them understand and establish the specific user flows and tasks, supporting functionality, and finally, to create a clickable prototype to hand off to the development team.

At the beginning of the project I interviewed the founders to find out their overall vision and goals, and establish the outcomes they wanted from the app. Together we pinpointed the key metrics we needed to track. The app also needed to gather basic user information, along with user’s preferred winery and tasting preference info. All of this data needed to be acquired painlessly at signup. This user profile information would in turn guide a key feature - wine recommendations based on the user’s preferences.The next phase was super granular as I broke down all the tasks that moved the user through the app. Each step got its own “user task story” to clearly define why each step was needed.

This was crucial in helping the stakeholders and dev team understand the purpose behind any of the functionality that needed to be built.All of this came together as I built the user flow map. This was then used to create a clickable prototype. Once the client clicked through the prototype demo screens, the project really started to feel alive. Assumptions were validated and we started troubleshooting several small details, before even getting to the development phase.

Research & Design

Collaborative roadmap development was key.

Outcomes

Giving the client better tools for decision-making.

“Artsdigital was able to help us stay really focused on the core goals for our initial launch, and provided a lot of clarity to a process that was new to us. They were able to balance our goals with what our end-user needed to succeed, as well as providing our developers with a really clear roadmap for building the final product.”

- Patrick Wong, Product Development, Spirit of 21.‍

The launched version of the app, developed by another team, stuck close to the structure I created, and provided a solid place to begin iterating for future improvements.

As with many startup projects like this the road to the next phase can be long and surprising. If I was to go back to the beginning I would have liked to have seen more resource go towards doing more tests with users during the wireframe prototype phase. At the time the founders were eager to get something built and deployable.

Right now the app is still available on both iOs and Android. The best part is, you get to drink wine, think about drinking wine, buy wine, and drink more wine. Cheers!

Sometimes you only are at the starting-line, and need to pass the baton.

It's all a part of Learning

Spirit of 21 App

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