Building Customer Trust
with Pinnacle Oak
Client
Andrew Munro, Pinnacle Oak Director
UX Design Sprint Team - June 2024
9 UX designers
Role
Co-lead for user flows, IA - information architecture, mid/hifi design, final presentation & speaker
Pinnacle Oak, the exclusive commercial agent for the renowned French Famille Sylvain group of 3 cooperages, required our team to design a new website to help establish business legitimacy for existing and new customers. A secondary task was to create the branding for Pinnacle Oak - logo, colour schemes and design system.
The first step was to research Famille Sylvain and what offers it customers and competitor cooperage agents.
The next step, interview winemakers, its customer base, to learn what they need and want from an agent.
Winemakers have been hesitant to work with the new agent due to a lack of trust established by a prior agent. The challenge lies in understanding the specific needs and concerns of winemakers, showcasing how the cooperage's premium brands can address those needs, and foster lasting, trust based relationships.
Who are Famille Sylvain? What is a cooperage and its products? What is an agent's role?
Who is the customer? Who are Pinnacle Oak's competitors?
My design team needed to explore, research and uncover answers to these questions through in-depth desktop research, heuristic evaluations and competitor analysis. Once this was discussed and synthesised, questions were formulated for 1-to-1 user interviews with a cooperage agent's customer base.
For my part, I thoroughly researched the Famille Sylvain, what a cooperage agent does and why. This was vital to the team understanding prestige and importance of cooperages and their role in the wine industry.
KEY INSIGHTS
Famille Sylvain reputation | Premium wine barrels | Artisan expertise | Modern techniques | Origin of the oak | Agent trust
Winemakers and wine industry colleagues are Pinnacle Oak's customer base. The interviews uncovered the most important aspects of a partnership with an agent and the cooperages they represent.
Winemakers made it clear a partnership develops over time, one-on-one and is based on trust and respect.
However, it is important to know about cooperages represented, where the oak comes from, the wine barrels available and a bit about who the agent is as a person.
WINEMAKERS JOURNEY
1. Talks to colleagues | 2. Researches agent | 3. Orders trial barrel | 4. Happy with result | 5. Full order with agent
Circling back to the client
It was the mid-way point in the design sprint and time to reveal our findings to our client, Andrew, about why the team believed Pinnacle Oak needed to be more than just a simple landing page, so as to provide the information winemakers are seeking when researching a potential agent.
I worked as co-lead on the development of the information architecture for the Pinnacle Oak website, which included high-level framework and detailed user flows. This was implemented into a mid-fi wireframe prototype.
Working in a sprint with a very short timeframe, meant we needed to adopt an agile mindset, moving quickly into completing the branding concepts voted on and mid-fi designs to present at the mid-way presentation.
Thankfully, the mid-way presentation gave us a clear direction forward into hi-fidelity design and prototyping.
Our client Andrew could see the importance of including the features winemakers need when researching an agent and the cooperages they represent, and wanted to include all of our suggestions.
He was also impressed by the moodboards and had a clear favourite backed by solid reasoning. He chose between two of the logos presented, with the idea that he may want to switch to one of the others.
The hi-fi design phase began with each team member quickly designing a homepage theme. A team vote revealed a clear design to move forward with and adapt to internal pages. The team was broken into 3 teams to work on sections of the website. Team members were tasked with completing transitions for a workable prototype for the user testing phase.
One team member with contacts in the industry took the prototype to a winemaker to test.
Overall, the participant, John, felt Pinnacle Oak was easy to navigate and all of the types of information he would be interested in, was readily available. A valuable comment to showcase 'Sourcing the Oak' prominently on the homepage was welcomed feedback, with some other aesthetic recommendations.
After making final iterations and checking the flow and transitions of the prototype. It was ready for the final client presentation. The team was anxious to see if we had met our client Andrew's expectations.
Andrew was absolutely thrilled! In his own words, "the work performed by the XI team has been nothing short of amazing. The quality of work achieved in such a short timeframe, and in such a specialised field has been impressive. In a short period of time, the team were able to understand the business, my USP, and the customer experience, to deliver an outstanding product. I would never have expected people from outside my industry to be able to speak with such authority on this specialised field …"
View prototype
What I learned …
I came out of this design sprint, with an enhanced appreciation of the wine industry and the intricacies within it.
I also learned that to move the team forward, sometimes it requires a person to speak up and help clarify concepts, so that the project remains focussed on its goals, without meandering off-track.
This sprint also solidified my thoughts that a successful UX design outcome, is more about creating a satisfying user experience, which is enhanced by the UI, rather than the other way around.
Finally, when you are removed from interacting with the development side of the project after handover, sometimes issues can arise that make the final outcome, not exactly as planned, but that is reality.
Pinnacle Oak goes LIVE
The website for cooperage agent Andrew Munro, has recently been completed.
Most importantly our goals - the overall IA, with vital information winemakers wanted in a cooperage website, as well as the branding and design aesthetics have been followed in the development stage.
Andrew in consultation with his development team made further iterations, with a logo change and other simplifications and deletions, so the final product looks different in some ways. Take a look.
Visit website
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