Hari Khalsa Simons

Demo site		Mood board		Web process book

Interaction and Interface Design, three weeks, spring 2005

I researched how people make wine buying decisions and designed a web site allowing them to get personalized recommendations. The recommendations are based on their tastes as well as input from people in their social network and wine "experts".

 

In a team of three or four, create a transactional website for wine recommendations.

To narrow our project scope, we explored user needs by using directed storytelling with 8 people, competitive evaluations of several popular wine sites, and bricks & mortar observations of wine stores and a winery. We found that people who are relatively new to wine could benefit greatly from an online resource, so we decided to focus on providing personalized recommendations for this population.

We created a mood board of images and text to express how the user will feel when at our site, and mental models showing how the user would approach and interact with our site. These artifacts grounded our design and helped us ensure that we were fully supporting the user's goals at any point in the process.

We designed our site on paper and in Illustrator, then implemented the demo using HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

The Grapevine is an online provider of personalized wine recommendations. Users can get recommendations based on their individual tastes or take advantage of recommendations from members of their social network or the experts. The Grapevine provides several ways to find just the wine you're looking for. Over time the system will learn the user's likes and dislikes and will be able to make highly informed recommendations.

The Grapevine also facilitates wine purchasing by providing a shopping list that users can print out and take to the store, which has the label, name, type, average price, and nearby locations where the wine can be purchased.

Samantha Konwinski, Lorri Nault and Charles Yiu. Advised by John Zimmerman.