THE WHINERY
Date: June 2017
UI/UX, Graphic Design, Javascript, Video
THE PROJECT
The Whinery is a collaborative project among three Multimedia students for our Interactive Authoring class at CSU East Bay. We call ourselves “The Whiners” as a pun to describe our stressful senior year. We wanted to create a simple guide that will aid both new and avid wine drinkers to learn about the different types of red and white wine. We developed a prototype of our product and submitted it into CSU East Bay's Blackbox Multimedia Show and became a showcase winner with the Media Award.
The project was coded through an open-source program called Processing using Javascript. Prototypes were made using wine bottles and RFID readers.
MEET THE TEAM
Mariel Toribio
UX / UI Designer, Graphic Designer, Videographer
Marcus Creel
UX Designer, Brand and Logo Designer
Josephine Dia
Prop Master, Graphic Designer
USER EXPERIENCE
As the user enters the display, they will be surrounded by instrumental music to help enhance the feeling of being in a winery. The user will be presented with six different wine variations (three reds and three white wines). Each wine bottle is assigned an RFID chip which is attached at the bottom of the bottle. The user will be prompted to select a wine of their choosing and place the bottle onto a wooden platform. The chip would be detected through an RFID reader and its information would be sent to the computer. As soon as the bottle touched the platform, information about the wine (ie. wine name, tastes, and food pairings, etc.) will be shown on the computer screen. The user will then have the option to return to the home screen or continue to learn more about each wine by picking up and placing another bottle.
WINE BOTTLE MOCKUPS
We each designed two wine bottle logos to resemble a fictitious winery brand.
I am a huge Kingdom Hearts fan and designed my wine bottles based on the key blades "Oblivion" and "OathKeeper".
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LOGO DESIGN
Marcus designed our logo, providing us with a sleek and classy identity. He then had the logo laser printed onto the box platform used for our prototype.
UI DESIGNS
Since we knew in advance that we wanted to submit the project into the art show, we wanted to have a simple UI design that was straightforward and easy to read. We included the wine type, food pairings, typical tastes, and a bit of humor to our design.
PROMO TRAILER
CHALLENGES
There were many technical challenges we faced while working on this project. As our product was going to be displayed for an art show, we wanted to ensure program stability. This meant our program would have to run without overheating or shutting down during the length of the showcase (which was roughly two hours). To achieve this, we would leave the program running during the whole duration of our class (roughly three hours) as we held multiple user testings and would edit accordingly based on the constructive feedback we had received.