Use Case Wine List

Suggested by: hungrytiger on LJ (10/18/12)

Use Case: Mobile Wine List

As described by Charley:

One app I could see wanting would be a wine list. I'm a wine drinker to the point of I know when I like something but I have no memory for which brands and varietals those were. Having a place to jot down which ones I like after drinking it would be handy (yes, there are existing apps for this, but having that list in one space with my other mental lists would be nice).

Charley also notes that he only records the wines he likes, not the ones he doesn't. And his usual fields are:

Type (White, Red, Etc.), Grape (Reisling, Shiraz, Etc.), Vintner, Name (Bottle), Origin (Country), Year, and notes (generally where I encountered it)

See also the Use Case Restaurant List.

Analysis

This one's nicely simple, and generalizes quite broadly. I have a lot of examples where I've wanted this myself, to keep track of all the X's that I buy and how much I like them.

In principle, this one is almost trivial, and there is a general Review and Ratings App at the root, but let's say that that gets specialized to Wine. Our main Model is Wine, which has Properties of Name, Type (a tag hierarchy with red/white/rose/etc at the top and various finer gradations underneath) and probably Year. It also has the usual 1-5 star Rating, which is kind of the point, and an optional Review Text field for comments. The UI needs to be mobile-focused, and as quick and trivial to use as possible: we want to minimum number of keystrokes for use. It needs summary reports by wine type and what I like most, including quick and easy lookups for mobile when I'm shopping.

An interesting variation is whether to include explicit Rating, or just treat this as a "Like" list. Charley usually just does the latter, which implies a slightly simpler UI; I usually do the former. We ideally want a Space-level switch of which version to use, and only show the Ratings if requested. (Otherwise, just treat everything as four stars for community-rating purposes?)

Features

• Feature - Mobile: Mobile is central to this App. I need to be able to enter wines from my phone when I'm at a restaurant. I want a shortcut on my phone's homescreen that takes me straight to my Wine List Space. I want a UI streamlined for entering a new wine quickly, including getting the right tags as fast as possible. I also want a Mobile UI for shopping, where I can easily list my favorites and search by name.

• Feature - Ratings: I've been assuming for a while that 1-5 star Ratings would be an early data type, but this Use Case is all about that. We may want the ability to have a switch which turns off explicit Ratings input, and simply marks all entries as a pre-specified level (four or five stars), for folks who only want to record "Like".

• Feature - Community Ratings: I'd already been contemplating this for the Poker Database, but this is an even better Use Case for this Feature. Ideally, I have my own Wine List Space, but that is connected to a common Community of people who use this App. Ratings are optionally shared with the rest of the community. I can search for reviews of a given wine among the community, and I can see the average and modality of the ratings of this wine in the community. (For extra credit, the community system would do smart groupings of the statistics, so that I see the ratings skewed towards how it was rated among people whose ratings are similar to mine. That requires some more serious data mining, but is potentially quite powerful.)