The problem came to us from a professor at my university. He wanted to make his collection of canned wines viewable online. My professor tasked me and my groupmates to make the website for him for our senior project but before we could do that we needed a groundwork of working on a product that displayed wines and information about the wine. Very little existed at the time of making the project, but my group mates and I were able to find a website that was in desperate need of an overhaul. The website was intended to be used by those who want to view wine collections or learn about the wines and we believed this was the audience that would be most interested in this project.
The predesign process for this project was intense. Our professor had high expectations for my group mates and I since this would lead into our senior project. Unfortunately our first draft of the website did not hold up to the professors standards and it was lackluster from mine and my groupmates standards as well. We were stuck and did not know where to go with the project, there was little to no organization in the way the users found a specific type of wine. We had a deep red color scheme, almost like a maroon, that did not work well for the website at all. After doing a check-in with our professor and classmates we got some suggestions that finally gave us the footing we needed to get going. We changed the color scheme and settled on a mega-menu for organizing all the different types of wines.
The final design was done using the industry standard program “Figma”, I believe this project did exactly what it was intended to do. It served as the groundwork for my group mates and I on our senior project and really showed us the process it can take to get to an end result. As I stated there are things I would still change, I would like to take another look at the color scheme and switch it from the greens. We wanted to keep a wine feeling but I do not think it works well. Another change I would make is taking another look at the product screen. I think the screen looks reminiscent of “Amazon” which is not a bad thing but I would like to make things look less like sliders and actual indicators of how sweet or bitter a wine is.
I had quite a few takeaways from this project. The first is patience, this is the first project I had where I felt stuck and it wasn’t just me that was stuck but my groupmates too. Normally if I’m stuck someone has a suggestion that gets the gears going again and the ball rolling. The second thing I learned was that it’s okay to ask for help, I had always been told this as a child growing up and kind of brushed it off. I could normally get out of jams myself and I had a hard time asking for help because of it, but if my group mates and I hadn’t asked for help, who knows how this project could have turned out. The last thing I learned was the process that designers can go through to finally get to the end result that they desire. The submitted project is the fifth rendition of the website that we finally submitted, there are still changes I would make and we probably would have gone through three or four more versions if we had the time.