How I did it

I used guerrilla usability testing, affinity mapping, and persona creation for my initial user research. During the redesign process, I discovered two pain points that I wanted to focus on, then created task flows and wireframes for the changes I wanted to make. Through building an interactive prototype, I was able to validate my assumptions. To better emulate a real-world startup time frame, I gave myself only a week for this case study. Now let’s go deeper into each step.

User Research

Guerrilla Usability Testing

To eliminate any personal bias, I carried a bottle of wine to Yerba Buena Gardens. I then asked five people who had never used Vivino to complete the following tasks, “Imagine it’s Thursday’s evening, and you are looking for a bottle of cheap, good wine to bring to a housewarming party. How would you go about it?” I filmed their interaction with the app (with permission), so I could analyze their interactions later.

Affinity Mapping

To organize my findings from the conversations, I watched the user interactions with the app, and I jotted down insights on a pile of sticky notes. I then categorized similar insights into an affinity map and weighed them against the Importance to User vs. Importance to Business on a 2x2 metric.

Users need to be able to find the list of wine quickly and accurately to help them make their purchasing decision. Since I don’t have access to Vivino’s business goals, I made the assumptions that user engagement and satisfaction are the most important things to the company.

Persona Creation

From the usability tests, I learned the following:

To better understand the typical user, I collected the information above, and created a persona that reflects the characteristics of those I had interviewed.