Intro

During Spring 2019, Fountain sponsored a project for our Experience Studio at Purdue University. We worked with their CEO Richard Pasquier through the whole semester. Fountain is an online alcohol marketplace and delivery service. It is currently in the beginning phases with hopes of becoming available on both mobile and web platform. The service allows users to purchase and have alcohol delivered to them along with suggested recommendations on different alcohols that are related to their own taste preferences. As it is just in the beginning phases, Fountain is still subject to considerable growth and change.

My roles: first and secondary research, usability testing, ideation, prototyping and style guide creation

Problem

Fountain wants to create a brand new alcohol online shopping experience. It wants to input social function and alcohol related education as well. One of the key factor that the sponsor required is taste profile. This is a tool which can track your drinking preference and gives recommendations. Another key function is social. The sponsor would like their customers being able to interact with friends and help with event planning. Summarized as these points:
1. Taste profile for better recommendations
2. Social event and friend function
3. Alcohol education (for those who are not 21 yet, they can still learn something from it)

Research

While going into secondary research, we wanted to understand more about alcohol consumers, the alcohol industry, and potential user groups. We wanted to look at the numbers surrounding the online alcohol industry to understand growth, biggest influencers, and other quantitative facts. With primary research, we conducted multiple rounds of interviews to narrow down our user group. In this first round of interviews, we had 3 overarching goals. First, we aimed to identify the user groups which would be most interested in Fountain. From there, we set out to identify the needs of these user groups to build them a better experience. Finally, we identified potential future user groups and how Fountain may be adjusted to include their needs.
Our main takeaways are:
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1. Participants were concerned about the cost of using an alcohol delivery app versus
picking up alcohol from their local grocery store
2. Participants who are parents are more likely to utilize an alcohol delivery app than those who are not parents
3, Participants who have a self-professed moderate level of alcohol knowledge are more likely to utilize an alcohol delivery app

Task Flow

We wanted to make sure we were developing ideas and features that our sponsor wanted. We decided to present him three different task flows that consisted of different iterations of the same screens which were constructed based on our task flow and ideation process. This task flow is the one selected by our sponsor.

Ideation

Started from the finding from above, we started our sketching of different screens. Each team member has their own sketching and we later come back together and talk about the things we want to keep and things we want to improve. After a few rounds of work, we came up a final sketching plan for the low-fidelity prototype

From left to right

Homepage: This page serves as the Home screen that users would be able to find their favorite alcohol based on different ways. It will also show the popular drinks that people are buying a lot.

Discovery: The discover page combines both special events and learning features such as how-to’s and recipes. This is a colorful page for the user to explore and learn about alcohol and the different ways they can use/make drinks.
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Profile: Profile page contains your personal information. It has all the shopping history and build up a flavor profile just for the user. Based on this tasting preference, Fountain is able to give right recommendations.

Calendar: This page allows user to build their own events and invite people. People will be able to add their wishlists and the app itself can notify the host to buy right drinks at the proper time.

We did the low and mid fidelity prototypes on Figma. In addition to digitizing our prototype, we took the opportunity to introduce mobile design standards into a few aspects of our design, such as a set pixel height for our bottom navigation bar.

Usability Testing

We wanted to gain quick feedback on our initial prototype sketch, so we conducted Guerrilla Testing with students and faculty on the Purdue University campus. We designed a couple of scenarios and tasks for the participants to do so we can keep a closer look of the using flow. Some of the takeaways from testing are:

1. Include an “Add a date” feature to the Calendar screen to allow users to easily add an event for a specific date
2. Include a “Send to friend” feature within the Product Details screen that allows the user to send a drink to a friend
3. Clarify whose “wish list” you are adding to. This meant clarifying which event you are adding alcohol preferences to

Final Solution

Style Guide

High-fidelity Prototype

Reflection

This is the first time that I worked on a nearly complete start to finish application. It touched a wide-range of skill sets and there were a huge amount of work needed to be on track of. A good task management skill is really helpful for these kind of big projects, we did a good use with Sprints and it gave me a very great prepare of learning about other methodologies when going into other working space.
None of us are "expert" in alcohol shopping so it's also a great chance for us to explore a group that we don't know too much about. Building empathy for these user group was not easy since we don't have a good access to people who is targeted as our user group. It was enjoyable when we were looking for right people to ask questions and it's always interesting to know the opinions that we've never think about.

Last but not the least, Fountain is still developing its apps and market space. Wish Fountain the very best luck in future growth!

Team Fountain, Spring 2019