Review: m.winealign.com

m.winealign.com is the mobile complement to WineAlign.com, a site that provides ratings, reviews and other information about wines for sale in the province of Ontario through the Liquor Control Board of Ontario’s (LCBO) network of retail stores.

Reviewed using a BlackBerry 9000 (“Bold”) 3G Wi-Fi smartphone, OS v. 4.6

Wine profile example from m.winealign.com

Have you ever found yourself looking at an intriguing bottle of wine but wishing you could get a quick and reliable second opinion before paying? WineAlign.com’s mobile site is for you.

What you get:

• Smooth browser detect, uncluttered login screen, easy sign-in
• Clean and scannable layouts for the search results pages and product pages, with unambiguous iconography and text, judicious use of images, and plenty of white space
• Succinct, scannable ratings and capsule summaries by member critics and WineAlign users.

m.winealign.com makes for a damn good mobile experience. It’s so easy to use, in fact, that most of the time you need only one hand — helpful when the other is holding a bottle or two.

Navigation features:

• Find Wine: Search by grape, region, price and/or store through several drop-down menu selections. Although the drop-downs can be long, they aren’t onerous
• My Wines: It has three submenus: Cellar, in which you pre-load the wines you already own into your user profile on the main web site or add to your cellar with a simple check box as you buy in-store; Favourites are the wines you have tasted and liked; and Shopping List, which is just as it sounds — what you want/need to buy. Favourites and Shopping List can only be created on the main site
• New Releases: Available to premium users only, the LCBOs newest wines are listed by release date, with ratings and reviews in descending order. In the free version, this feature is a link to a sparse page; better would be a premium registration page or, at the very least, something that better upsells the benefits of the paid subscription
• Wine Search: A simple search box for locating wines by LCBO product number or keyword. For product numbers, winery names and specific labels the search engine is accurate; for more general searches it produced a comprehensive selection of products, listed from highest rated to unrated
• Food Match: Search by keyword for food type or recipe or drill down through a list of common food categories to specific cooking styles. Results start with a classic match (e.g., “Chianti for chicken-based tomato sauces”) followed by secondary recommendations (e.g., “goes great with Montepulciano, Beaujolais, Gamay, Pinot Noir”). These suggestions are followed by “Critic Recommended Wines” according to the heading, but alas no recommendations actually follow

The gem:

The killer feature — when it works — is the ability to find out which stores have a wine in stock, and how many bottles. If your preferred (ie, default) location doesn’t have the wine in stock, a handy “Find wine” text link generates a list of nearby locations that do carry it (with a Google Maps link), starting with the closest.

On at least two occasions during testing there were discrepancies between what WineAlign told me and what my eyes saw on the shelf. Technical issues with the stock data upload from the LCBO, lag times between the data dump and your shopping, or a glowing wine review that day by a popular critic interfere with its accuracy. That said, if the store does happen to be sold out, you can quickly find out what stores nearby do have it.

What should change:

1. Add a registration option to the mobile site
2. Make it easier to choose and change your defaults/preferences on the go. The registration process forces you to enter your postal code, which determines your default liquor store location. If you remove the default option on the web site, you can’t choose one on the go. For someone who regularly shops at 5 different locations, this is a hassle
3. Expand the results pages default length to 25 items, or at least give those of us who would rather scroll than page the option to change the number of items appearing per page
4. Better differentiate between “Find Wine” and “Wine Search”. Perhaps “Select a Wine” instead of “Find Wine”
5. Enable the search engine to handle common misspellings (searches on “rief”, “dom perinon” and “brunelo” returned “no wines found”; “reisling” and “riesling” returned two separate sets of results). Better yet, it should permit wildcard searches to lessen the tediousness, and risk of typos, that comes with typing on a small keyboard
6. Flag Airmiles point promotions. Better yet, allow users to sign up for text message alerts via SMS. And consider doing so for limited time offers (price reductions) as well, although given the LCBO’s parsimony, it may well not be worth the effort

I applaud the folks behind WineAlign for creating a mobile site rather than an app, which would have incurred the extra cost of creating versions for the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android platforms. A mobile site makes WineAlign available to a larger audience, while the optimization for iPhone and BlackBerry browsers ensures that it appeals to what is no doubt WineAlign’s core demographic. That’s smart.

Going with a mobile site positions WineAlign well in the coming years when apps won’t be as necessary. This way it gets its learnings early and can improve sooner, making a good service even better.