McBride Sisters
Time Frame: 3 weeks
Role: Project Lead, UX/UI designer
Tools: Figma, Trello, Zoom, Optimal Workshop, Slack, Discord
Deliverables: Hi-fidelity wireframes
The McBride Sisters winery is the largest black-owned wine company in the United States. They pride themselves in having wine collections that inspire women and celebrate diversity. How might we help the McBride Sisters engage with their customers in a way that creates lasting connections to the brand
From a competitive analysis, site audit, user interviews, tree sorting, and usability testing, an Events page was created as an addition to the website's global navigation, this will encourage users to interact with the brand in a more personalized way. The global configuration was also reconfigured to allow their customers to search for their products quicker and easier
01. Competitive Analysis
I started the research phase with a Competitive Analysis. The main goal of my research was to understand how different brands use their websites to portray themselves as a brand. I also wanted to see how these companies displayed their products, navigation, and filters. I used 4 companies: The Family Coppola Winery, Tito's Handmade Vodka, Drizly, and lastly Josh Cellars
Personality: All of the liquor brands I visited had a website that displayed their personality in a more in-depth manner. It is their opportunity to showcase their story, background events, founders, and more. For example, Tito's Handmade Vodka doesn't sell their products on their website, it is purely about it's founder Tito and his fundraisers, story, blog, travel, fundraisers, etc
Emotion provoking imagery: Josh Cellars, The Family Coppolar, and Tito's had one thing in common: incredible images to go along with their stories and personality. Providing the company with a face, whether it is a partner, owner, or consumer, creates a sense of empathy.
Filters: I went to Drizly to understand how they filter their wine section. I noticed they had tons of different filters such as: flavor, type, brand, label, region, food pairings, and more.
02. User Interviews
My team conducted 5 user interviews with different wine lovers to get a sense of their wine shopping / drinking habits. What we learned is that there are 2 types of wine drinkers:
Type A: care-free wine drinkers who enjoy the social aspect of drinking
Type B: wine enthusiasts who know what they like and they also enjoy knowing more about the wine they are drinking
Users were also asked about their experiences (if any) in any wine tasting events. Both types of users showed interest in these events. Type A enjoys drinking wine and socializing with an outstanding quote being "It seems fun because you get together with people and get drunk" when asked about about wineries. Type B on the other hand, enjoys drinking and learning more about the wine with one user stating "I liked the wineries because they were tours demonstrating how they make the wine”.
From the user interviews we also found that: normally these users do not shop for their wine online. They shop in person when doing their normal grocery shopping, it is a part of their routine. They also don't seem to have any common pain points when shopping for wine online.
We got these insights from doing an affinity map together as a group. When doing the affinity map, we noticed that there are no major common pain points when buying wine. Users enjoy their routine and enjoy picking out a bottle in the store. They like picking out new things to try and are not inclined to purchase online because of the fees. On that note, because we saw a lot of people being interested / excited about wineries / wine events and we saw a need of socialization during the pandemic, we decided to highlight the need for a social experience for socially distanced wine lovers
03. Usability Testing
My teammates and I conducted various usability tests with 5 different users. They were prompted to do various tasks. Our main findings were:
users were not able to filter the wine they wanted based on certain characteristics (type, price, label, etc)
Filters
users were frustrated they did not get the results they were hoping for when using the search bar
Search Bar
when prompted to find an event, users dislikes having to dig into the site to find a specific event. Some outstanding quotes were: "They don't even have an events tab!"
Navigation
04. Questionnaire
After doing our user interviews and usability testing. As a team, we already knew that the right direction to take was to create an Events page where the McBride Sisters could give socially distanced wine lovers a chance to socialize and engage with the brand. But, we still wanted to validate our findings. Me and my teammate Bethlehem created a questionnaire that asked users to input if they were at all interested in wine events.
We got a total of 13 responses. A total of 84.7% users were interested in a variety of wine tasting events, specifically Wine and Food tastings.
This questionnaire validated our assumption of a need for a social experience during the pandemic.
05. User Persona
From our research, we started our ideation phase. We came up with two different personas that identified our user's wants, needs, and pain points. As I mentioned earlier, in the user interviews we identified two types of wine drinkers, in this project we focused on the needs, behaviors, pain points, and goals of both types since they are trying to achieve the same goal: find a social experience during the midst of a global pandemic
Chloe Roberts
Chloe works fulltime and values her free time. She spends most of her free time with friends. She enjoys drinking with friends on social occasions.
Needs: needs to find an alternate way to socialize now that COVID is a concern
Frustrations: has not been able to see her friends as much because of the pandemic and social distancing measures
Behaviors: buys wine based on the branding of the bottle, typically drinks whatever is around
Elise Flores
Elise is a hardworking woman with a tight schedule. She likes to have a glass or two of wine occasionally with her meal or when relaxing after a long day.
Needs: wants to expand her wine knowledge
Frustrations: most of her in person wine events and tastings have been cancelled due to COVID-19
Behaviors: she always has wine in her house, she always looks online for the best awarded wines
06. Sketching
After our research, we knew that we wanted to put the owners of the brand and their story front and center. As we saw from our interviews and questionnaires, users are more likely to interact with a brand if they are intrigued by the company and their values. As a team, we worked on a "Crazy 8's" exercise to come up with designs for our new site. That being said, we wanted to focus on the following aspects for our design:
Focus on owner and brand story
Add Events tab in global navigation
Events page should showcase all events displayed on site, as well as the wines the events will include for easy purchase
Design should be minimalist to showcase beautiful imagery from the brand
Add simple filters for easy access to wine of choice
Make "Find our Wines" process easier for the user
07. Concept Development
Once we had our personas, and started our designs, we went ahead and constructed our new sitemap. We used a tree testing later on to validate our navigation redesign,
The most important change for this sitemap is the addition of the Events tab for better accessibility of all the events they provide on their site, as well as a better organization in the Shop section for easy and simple shopping.
With the sitemap established, our process was to develop user flows of certain tasks because we want to ease the amount of choices the user needs to make and to also allow less clicks to reach to the user's desired destination.
08. Digital Wireframes
Landing Page
We designed a page that puts a face on the brand, making the users feel more connected to their story and wanting to engage with the founders in a deeper way.
Our Story Page
Since we are making a focus on the founders of the brand and their story, it was important for us to make an impactful story-telling page for their story.
Events Page
Our main feature for the redesign was the Events page. We wanted to highlight the different events they have to offer, as well as the dates, wine tasting kit, speakers and miscellaneous details regarding specific events.
Shop Page
Product display and filtering was essential for the site. We wanted to highlight the variety of products they offer as well as their very special labels
09. Visual Guide
We decided to go with the font Saira and Josefin because we wanted to convey the sense of elegance but affordability at the same time.
For the color palette at the other hand, we went ahead with a neutral color palette because of the McBride Sister's colorful and powerful imagery. A simple and neutral palette will maintain the focus on the sisters and their story.
10. Usability Testing
After our final iteration we conducted 5 usability tests to test the functionality of our website. The following points were the key insights users provided:
Users were confused by the checkout process options. We gave them the option to either sign in, create an account or check out as a guest. They felt it was too complicated
Users also found the font choice to be futuristic / robotic
11. What I learned and Next Steps
As I reflect on my first team project in UX, I'm really happy with how my team and I were able to tackle the problem and empathize every step of the way. I learned the importance of feedback and reasoning behind that feedback. Overall, my team and I were able to create a efficient and creative way to make socially distanced events fun and allow users to reconnect in these hard times.
For our next steps our team will be working in:
Changing the font choice for something that represents the brand better
Create a more intuitive check out process to allow the users a quick and easy way to get their wine
Create a mobile version for the website. The McBride Sisters have a huge following on social media, we would like for those followers to have easy access from anywhere they are
We would also conduct more user interviews to discover any outlier pain points users have when drinking and enjoying wine we might consider for the future