GrapeTrail

Soon after moving back from Australia, I wanted to visit local Ontario wineries. Google Maps wasn't as helpful at the time so I downloaded a few different apps. Most of the apps were essentially a list (think Contacts app) of wineries with little to no options to filter. After becoming frustrated with the experience, I pitched to my friend Mark Gage—who was studying Computer Science at Brock University at the time—how it could be a fun experience to build an iOS app that could help users find and visit local wineries.

Since I had never built an app before, I had no idea of how difficult it can be. I was naive, and I'm so grateful that I was. Building GrapeTrail helped me get a job as a UX Designer at KEV Group, and accidentally "fall" into tech.

Simple wine filters

Generally when you ask someone what type of wine they like, they're like to respond with a colour than a specific varietal. Keeping this in mind, we made it easier for users to find wineries that made the type of wines they liked (e.g. red, white, rose, sparkling, dessert, etc.). This helped users find wineries that they were more likely to enjoy without feeling overwhelmed by all the varietals—or feel like they would miss out if they didn't select a varietal in the filter. This also made it easier for winery owners to quickly set up and maintain their profiles rather than having to remember to update it each season.

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Multi-stop navigation

In GrapeTrail, users could create a personalized itinerary of all the wineries they wanted to visit. Since this was well before Google offered the ability to add multiple stops for a trip, we had to figure out how to build this feature ourselves in the app. To create the illusion of a continuous trip, we essentially created a string of trips behind the scenes that would start and stop depending on the user's location. For example, users could start the trip and get turn-by-turn directions. Then, once they arrived at the winery, the app would automatically "pause" the trip until the user was ready to "resume" the trip when they wanted to visit the next winery. Of course, we simply started a new trip from their current location to the next winery behind the scenes, but users felt that the app was able to offer a multi-stop navigation.

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CMS for wineries

We built a CMS to ensure wineries could update their information when they wanted. We focused on keeping the CMS as simple as possible to ensure it didn't require the winery owners to feel as if they had to constantly keep checking in on their listing. To help speed this process up further, we manually populated as much information as we could find about them from their website; Google Maps wasn't what it is now. This approach to pre-populate the winery info also made it easier for wineries to agree to be on our platform and promote the app in their tasting rooms and on their website.