Life’s too short to drink bad wine
(even if you have to buy it online)
Article written by Maud de Boer, Lidija Krcmar and Maaike Wachters.
Introducing Het Stuivertje
For our third Ironhack project, we were asked to design a desktop e-commerce website for a local business. After some research and looking for possible stakeholders, we found Wine Bar Het Stuivertje. The restaurant and wine bar, which was founded over 40 years ago, is a well known place in the Jordaan district. At Het Stuivertje, they serve authentic and honest food. And it’s important for them to serve the perfect wines with the food as well!
Stakeholder interview
The stakeholder interview was conducted with Rachid el Mouhandiz, the general manager of Wine Bar Het Stuivertje. The bar is a place where people come to have some wine and food, but Rachid prefers to talk about it as selling “a story” or “an experience”. He’s not just providing food and drinks, he wants people to make memories at his wine bar, and he wants them to have a good evening together and to have good conversations. According to Rachid, a bottle of wine is an essential part of that. The unique wines he serves are his selling point.
From our interview with Rachid, it became clear that he’s a man that likes to talk, but also loves to listen. His customers often ask him for advice on which wine to drink, and he says he can only give them good advice if they tell him a little bit about themselves. He can then match the wine to the kind of person they are.
Rachid would like to take his business to the next level and wants to sell the unique wines offered at his restaurant on an online e-commerce platform as well.
Analysing the competition
For our competitive analysis we looked at wine bars that have a similar concept as Het Stuivertje. We found two wine bars and one wine shop that also offer quality wines as well as personalized advice. We found out that the competition mainly sells its wines in their online shop as a second business, the focus on their websites is on the actual physical shop. Thus, we saw the opportunity to do it the other way around, and put the online shop in front for Het Stuivertje.
After that we sketched the market positioning map, where we included some other online wineshops as well. At this stage, we came to the conclusion that ideally, Het Stuivertje has to score high on the ‘personalized online advice’ axe to be able to offer something that the competition doesn’t.
User Research
In order to get to know the possible users of the wine bar’s e-commerce site we ran a survey aimed at people who enjoy drinking a good wine. We got around 70 respondents, neatly divided between male and female and different age groups. It seems like everyone appreciates a good wine!
The main results we got from the survey can be summarized as follows:
Our respondents like to drink good wine because it has a more interesting and better taste, and they see it as a treat for themselves. The quality of the wine is an important factor when deciding where to go to buy wine, the price not so much. Most respondents would consider themselves rather knowledgeable about wine, and prefer buying their wine in specialty shops where they can get advice based on their personal tastes and the food the wine will be paired with.
We also did secondary research about selling wine online in general, and some important insights from this were: online selling and drinking wine at home has become more important because of Covid-19, but people are still looking for the restaurant experience: they want to talk to someone to get personalized advice and they want to feel like they’re drinking something special and just right for them. There are many online wine shops, so if you want to sell wine online, you need to offer more than just wine to be able to stand out amongst the fierce competition. Covid-19 also offers more opportunities: it is getting more common for people to buy wine online.
Using the data and insights we gathered from the survey and secondary research we came up with our user persona: Boudewijn van Brussel.
Defining the problem
So what is the exact problem we are trying to solve for Boudewijn? We came up with quite a few different wine related problems we could solve for Boudewijn, but in the end we decided to focus on the one thing that kept coming up in the research: the need to get personalized advice and feel like the wine you have purchased is exactly right for you. So we continued further in the process armed with the following statement: How might we give specific personalized advice online, so people feel like they have been recommended something special which suits their needs? We brainstormed, mindmapped and Crazy Eight-ed for a while, every time coming up with a lot of ideas and features. In the end we had to do several prioritisation exercises to get to a small enough basic feature we could build our MVP on. We settled on being able to set up an account on the webshop, where you can register and store your wine preferences. You can also find your previous purchases on the webshop, with the possibility to rate them, so the next time you order the webshop can give you very specific advice based on your tastes.
Prototyping
The next step was to make the first prototype, which looked like this:
We tested the prototype on a couple of people and the main comments we got were:
- The testers didn’t understand where to log in.
- People wanted to be able to give star ratings to the products. In the lo-fi there was no option for that.
- Testers wanted to see the history of previous purchases.
- Reviews are missing on the home page.
- It wasn’t clear what the avatar would do.
- There is no ‘Log out’ button.
Using the results of this first round of testing, we moved on to our mid-fi prototype, which looked like this:
Again, we tested the mid-fi prototype and the main results were:
- The login button was unclear.
- People didn’t realise they had to rate their purchased wines on their personal page.
- The main feature on the website is that people can make a personal page. This feature is not shown as clear as it should be on the home page.
Next Steps
The first thing to do would be to make some changes to the prototype based on the feedback we got during the testing. Most importantly, to make it more clear on the homepage what the purpose is of making a personal page (i.e. being able to get very personalized advice).
In this sprint, we got a lot of work done in a short amount of time. But for future iterations, we would suggest having a meeting with our stakeholders, as we didn’t have the time to do this yet. And do more usability testing to make sure that people are aware of the main benefit of our feature: getting personalized advice on which wine to buy.
Learnings
The key takeaway from this project is that in the future its essential to listen to each other, take one step at a time, and document all steps in the process. And make sure to have good wine to treat yourself after working hard on this project. ;)