Designing the web & product experience for a wine app that learns your taste

About

Green Glass is a wine app for beginners. Point it at the list in a dark restaurant, mid-conversation, and it hands you one bottle you’ll actually like.

It comes out of Golden Egg Media and is led by Sarah Dempsey, who brought us a clear worry: wine talks down to people. Words like “oakiness”, a sommelier’s tone, ratings that say “hate it”. Her mission was the opposite: bring people together in real life, around a bottle everyone at the table enjoys.

Over three months we designed the iOS app end to end: onboarding and the taste quiz, Scan, the Cellar, Social, the monthly Hit List and the Taste Profile, in light and dark. Then we designed and built sipgreenglass.com, with its own taste quiz and a game in the footer. Yeji Lee, Golden Egg’s designer, drew the brand’s stickers and illustrations alongside us.

Challenge

Beginners choose wine in the worst conditions: a dark room, a long list, a table waiting. The app had to give one confident answer fast, and never sound like a sommelier.

So Scan leads from day one and everything else earns its place after it. The taste profile unlocks after three bottles and is made to be screenshotted, prices read as a philosophy instead of dollar signs, and nothing uses a word a beginner would have to look up.

The look does the same work. Green is kept for the main actions, every wine style has its own colour, titles are handwritten over a calm sans, and the illustrations became thick-outline stickers, so the app feels like a friend’s notebook rather than a wine list.

Outcomes

Three months from kickoff to launch: the app in its developers’ hands and sipgreenglass.com live, taste quiz and game included.

The handoff landed well. Green Glass’s team said their developers were “so impressed with the work”, and Sarah called our file “the most organized figma I have ever seen”. She also made it to level 7 of the game.