Cheesepedia - a cheese database and review site anyone can edit
Hello, my name is Raymond and I'm a cheeseaholic. One day I returned from the grocery store with yet another delicious, funky, moldy piece of heaven to hide in the fridge from my wife. I decided to first look up my cheese online. I wanted to know its taxonomy, it genus and species, its cousins, and also to know whether or not I picked up a stinker--and not the good kind of stinker.
Being a beer enthusiast familiar with sites like BeerAdvocate, I expected to find a similarly expansive cheese database with reviews, scores, lists, and more. Instead I found plenty of producer websites and a few blogs whose reviews were few-and-far-between.
I smelled ripe opportunity and thus Cheesepedia was born.
Being a beer enthusiast familiar with sites like BeerAdvocate, I expected to find a similarly expansive cheese database with reviews, scores, lists, and more. Instead I found plenty of producer websites and a few blogs whose reviews were few-and-far-between.
I smelled ripe opportunity and thus Cheesepedia was born.
Initial research
First, I turned my own experience into personas and created a couple more, keeping in mind the types of users that Cheesepedia would interest.
Lydia Frost is a conscientious shopper and wants to impress her guests with her knowledge and good taste. She's interested in time saving suggestions.
Dane Rockford is an opinionated connoisseur who not only wants to leave his reviews of various regional and international cheeses but wants a deep, encyclopedic experience where he'll learn about new cheeses. He also wants a site that will reward him for being a subject matter expert.
Kevin Glasnow is the proprietor of Happy Cow Creamery, and is wondering how he can position his products into a competitive market. He knows the internet can give him an edge and is ready to refer his customers to a website where they can generate word-of-mouth marketing.
Next I asked the members of an online cheese community what they would like to see in a database. It seemed that several had the same experience that I did. The only databases out there were local and their focus and audience were too small to generate a national conversation.
"I feel like there's a lot of small cheese databases out there, but I haven't found a massive one. It would be really cool to see, especially if you could rate the cheeses and see which are the favorites and least favorites :)"
"eatwisconsincheese.com is a treasure trove of information. My only complaint is that you need to search by cheese instead of being able to browse."
Site map and User Epics
Using my research and personas, I began to convert user needs into Epics (or high-level user stories). The epics broke down like this:
I realized that the site would have a few types of pages (I will refer to them as "entries") that would allow for browsing in a variety of ways. There would be the following types of entries:
- Cheese entry - information about a specific cheese with reviews and links to other types of entries
- Type entry - information on the type of cheese, with alternate names, related types, and a list of the top individual cheeses of that type
- Producer entry - information on a specific producer with a list of their cheeses
- Location entry - information about cheesemaking in a particular city, region, province, or country.
Sketches
I went through two iterations of sketches focusing on the Cheese Entry page, where users would spend most time, and which most functions were centered around.
I ran these early sketches by my colleague who works in front-end development to ensure my ideas would be understandable to others and to brainstorm technical ways to boost the site's usability.
Wireframe
A digital wireframe of the Cheese Entry page. Combined with other wireframes I created a prototype for the first round of user testing.
