Beta Acid

Where it Began

I love wine. It is an interest and hobby that was passed down to me by my dad. It’s not about having the most expensive bottle from the most prestigious winery in a famous Old World region. What I love is enjoying a tasty beverage that inspires conversation with a group of good people. Wines taste different depending on who you drink it with - and often better with great company.

This interest has resulted in a tendency to buy a lot of wine. Many wines are meant to age, some of them for 20+ years until they are “ready to drink”. My apartment likely resembles Central Park in the early fall. But instead of squirrels and nuts, I have wine tucked into every nook and cranny that could reasonably store a bottle.

The Idea

My obstacle then became how do I keep track of all of this? I started with a spreadsheet where I logged every bottle including country, region, subregion, designation, grape varietals, vintage, alcohol, residual sugars, purchase price, where I purchased it, etc. I made a map of my apartment, numbered each “wine storage area”, and started including a location code in my handy-dandy spreadsheet. Then I thought to myself, there must be an app for this!

I browsed through the app store and although there are a number of options, none of them seemed to fit my exact need - most of them geared towards trying to get me to buy even more wine. After some thought and conversations, we decided to build one.

In my years with Beta Acid, I have watched the design process happen several times as an observer. Picking up tips and tricks of how to think through various flows and best practices of the most common screens. I am by no means a Designer. But I figured I would give it a shot - by hand.

What I Learned

I gave myself a week to draw up sketches outlining the MVP version of what I needed - an app to track my wine - and decided to call it Vintt. A vault for my vino. I learned a few things that I want to pass on to others that may have an idea for a digital product and do not know the first step to bring it to life.

Do not start with the home screen

I started sketching with the perspective of a user and where a typical user starts when they open an app - the home screen. I spent almost my first day drawing (and redrawing, and redrawing) the home screen. My passion for wine took over and I thought it would be so cool to have every idea on the home screen. Next thing I knew, the “home screen” was five screens. Doh!

Eventually, common sense broke through and I decided to do the home screen last. In its essence, the home screen is a jumping off point for the rest of the app. Like an executive summary, you can’t write it without the rest of the paper.

Too many details

It is so easy to fall down rabbit holes and not even know it. As I thought through the Wine Details screen, I started searching the internet to figure out every single attribute of every single wine in the world. I wanted to capture all types of wine information and account for every scenario.

After a couple hours of this, I realized that the app, especially the MVP, does not need to capture every single little attribute of a wine. For one, no user is going to input every single detail of every bottle they own and the MVP will not have a wine database to pre-fill this information. Secondly, not all of it is relevant when you are trying to decide what wine to drink with dinner.

I erased half of my sketch and settled on the top five attributes. I reminded myself for the rest of the process to take a step back often and think through what I, as a user, really needed in this app.

A short deadline

For a few days, I kept going back to my sketches to change and tweak things that I thought were not quite right. If I would have compared my drawings from 3 days ago to today, I guarantee you could not spot any significant differences. I’m glad I gave myself only a week as I’m sure I could have gone a month without feeling like I was done.

I know that it is important to build a proof of concept that I can put in my hands and use in real life. It will be more valuable to define the product than these small tweaks. Even armed with this knowledge beforehand, I was eager to keep refining my sketches. Deadlines are important, if only to keep us from over thinking every step of the way.

Summary

I hope my personal experience and learnings will help an ideator out there pause thinking and start building. Over the next few weeks, we will build out a proof of concept of Vintt and share updates throughout the process.

Let’s build something together!