A Fun & Competitive Twist on Tasting Wines Blind - Vino Cieco

Background

My partner and I are big wine nerds. One year at our annual holiday potluck we hosted a wine tasting game that is now a tradition (4 years and counting 🎉). I created the prototype below of a full fledged web app that would make hosting the game even easier.

The goal is to make a wine focused web & mobile app that works like a JackBox meets Partiful with some Qualtrics built in. This app would improve upon the current method I built using custom Google Forms & Sheets.

How it Works:

Objective: Bring the best wine and win! Simple as that. The prize? A collection of bottles to savor with your victory.

Pre-Party

Choose a Wine Type: Friends decide on a wine category (red, white, bubbly, etc.).
Buy Two Bottles: Each person buys two identical bottles of the chosen wine category.
Select a Host: The group nominates a host for the party.

Party Time

Check-in & Survey: Guests arrive, check in their bottles, and open a mobile rating survey.
Blind Tasting: The host blinds one bottle from each bottle pair.
Pour & Rate: The host pours the blinded wines, and guests taste and rate them.

Party Conclusion

Submit Ratings: Guests submit their ratings.
Announce Winner: The host aggregates the ratings and announces the winner.
Winner's Prize: The winner receives all the "second" bottles (the unblinded duplicates).

Original Designs & Workflow

Uses a mixture of custom Google Forms & Sheets with some nifty plugins
Basic ten point scale
Text boxes to keep track of tasting notes
Sheets are linked to the forms dataset and aggregates data through pre-built functions when guests submit survey.

A screenshot of forms and ratings from our first 2022 party. We have since improved some of the workflows and graphics.

Designing a Real Product From This Tradition

I tend to start designs with LoFi mockups on paper while I build out a basic architectural flows in PowerPoint or Visio. This generates a baseline organization that I will further design upon.

I also use competitive analysis to see how leaders in the industry set up their flows. In this case, I gained inspiration from e-invitation products like Elfster and Partiful.

Lo-Fi Designs

With the above information architecture laid out I am able to generate wireframes of what pages should look like.
I prefer to use MS PowerPoint and Visio during this phase because it prevents me from getting ahead of myself with prototyping in Figma.

Hi-Fi Designs

I finalize a color scheme and logo based off of my LoFi designs.
I then move over to Figma and build out pages to get to a prototype as quick as possible.
The faster I prototype, the more time I have to put into creative workflows.

Interactive Figma Prototype: Public Landing Page Link 👈

Future Plans

The wine and technology lover in me would love to see this be a real production app, however, it may very likely remain a design perpetually. That being said, I will continue day dreaming of fun apps like this because it keeps my creative juices flowing. 🍷

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse