Sippd

ROLE: PRODUCT DESIGNER
RESPONSIBILITIES: RESEARCH, PROTOTYPE, DESIGN
FREELANCE
 

Sippd is your personal sommelier that helps you discover wines you'll love using their Taste Match machine learning algorithm and staff curated collections. I redefined the UX for Sippd’s website, plugin, and native app experience with a focus on improving onboarding efficacy, deepening engagement, boosting wine ratings, and improving recommendations for customers.

Desired Outcome

Empower customers to discover wines they’ll love from across the world all in one place for the best deal possible.

Defining Success

We measure success for the Sippd product through customer acquisition and activation metrics like Sign Ups, Downloads, Profile Creations, Taste Match Unlocks, and Wine Purchases.

Auditing & Improving
the Native App

On my initial audit of the Sippd native app, I encountered several usability issues and significant friction in the onboarding process that prevented would-be customers from understanding the functionality and value of the product. We decided the most impactful opportunity to acquire, activate, and retain customers was to redesign the onboarding flow to help customers realize value quickly.

To achieve the client’s goal of launching as quickly as possible, we agreed to make minimal changes to the app’s core UI and concepts.

1. Improve Priming for Key Actions

I revisited when and how Sippd asked customer’s for access to their camera, location, and permission to send notifications to ensure they were set up for success in the app:

PRINCIPLES

• Deliver a full experience to users the first time

• Ask for access to device capabilities only after the natural need occurs in the onboarding flow

• Garner trust with customers through specific, but concise explanations on Sippd’s access needs

2. Increase Customer Wine Preference Signal

The existing experience relied solely on user’s submitting 3 wine reviews to train Sippd’s Taste Match algorithm. We added a Wine Style selection experience, which significantly reduced the barrier to value for our customers while helping better understand their wine preferences to inform their ML.

3. Increase Wine Reviews & Taste Match Unlocks

To “Unlock Your Taste Match“ is to receive wine recommendations that are truly personalized to your palate. Taste Match is the core value proposition for Sippd, however customers must submit three wine reviews to unlock the most accurate recommendations. We simplified the review interface, tracked progress toward unlocking taste match, and created a review looping review flow to encourage more reviews.

Pivoting to the Plugin

The COVID Pivot

In response to covid dining restrictions, Sippd temporarily pivot away from fine dinning use cases to tap into the surge of online wine purchasing behavior. We decided to pursue a Chrome extension as a way of embedding Taste Match into online wine retailer experiences like Wine.com.

INTEGRATING INSIGHTS FROM NATIVE APP USER TESTING

We utilized our native app MVP and a lot of insights from user testing to hit the ground running. The insights we gleaned from user testing heavily informed our approach to the plugin:

• Rate vs Review: People negatively perceived the term “Review“ because they assumed they would have to write a public comment or that they didn’t have enough expertise.

• Rigid Flows: Users felt that the focused review flow was too rigid claiming they felt trapped and that they wanted more information about the each wine they were rating.

• Unlocking Taste Match: It turns out remembering three wines you’ve tasted before was difficult for most participants.

• Discovering wines through Staff Curation: Moving Sippd’s value of wine recommendations forward with Staff Curations and more flexible flow.

Measure Impact

Like I mentioned above we measured success for the Sippd product through metrics like Sign Ups, Downloads, Profile Creations, Taste Match Unlocks, and Wine Purchases.

INCREASED PROFILE CREATIONS

After implementing key pieces of the onboarding flow above we experienced an 185% MoM increase in Profile Creations from September to October 2020.

We will continue to iterate, test, and measure the success of the Sippd UX to ensure we’re always improving customer’s ability to extract value from the app.