A great user experience on Wine.com

A craving for a South African Pinotage led me to Wine.com last week, and I was extremely impressed with the site and the overall experience. Here's why I liked it so much. I think these principles should be top of mind during product design and development:

1. An online search experience designed around the natural offline experience. Even though there is a search box to look for a specific wine, it is not very prominent. Instead the "Shop For Wine" page is designed to help you find the wine you need based on price, location, varietal, etc. I was able to find South African Pinotages <$20 in less than a minute. You are able to add and remove filters in any order you'd like. I like this experience because they thought about the type of users that are going to come to the site, and what their needs are going to be. Buying wine is a browse & taste experience offline -- and they recreated that experience online through a really good browse experience.
   
2. Progressive product information disclosure. Once I got to $20 and Below > South Africa > Red Wine > Pinotage, a description appeared underneath the breadcrumb: Pinotage, a crossing made by the South Africans, is a hardy, rustic grape, with gamey and smoky mixing with wild berry flavors. Underneath this one-sentence overview was a "read more" link which exposes a dynamic layer pop-up on the page itself so that you can read more about the varietal without having to leave the page (more on that later). The search results gives you the information you need, and clicking into a specific wine leads to a world of additional information. But they don't dump it on you all at once -- progressive content disclosure is a difficult concept to get right, but they do it perfectly here.
   
3. Dynamic page elements allows maximum interaction without having to leave the page. I mentioned the "read more" link about the varietal in my second point, but I also noticed a great interaction element that I haven't seen on any other sites before. Clicking on "Add to cart" doesn't take you to your shopping cart -- it has a dynamic element that provides feedback about your action, but allows you to continue to shop without ever leaving the page. Below is a short video of it -- notice how the number of items in your cart updates automatically as well.
   
   
   
   
4. The experience doesn't end once you place an order. Let me just say that this is a company that understands wine-drinkers, and aims to provide a total experience with their products.
   • Once you place your order, you have the option to download and print "Cellar Notes", detailed descriptions of the wine you just bought, with an area to write down your own notes.
   • The wine arrives with a welcome letter that also gives you 1c shipping on your next order.
   • The box includes labels for your wines that you can hang on the bottles to make them easy to identify

This is only the second time it's ever happened to me that I become a loyal customer after my first interaction with a company (the other was Vonage, if anyone is wondering...). This experience was designed to be consistent online and offline. It was designed to never let technology get in the way of your goal -- to buy the perfect bottle of wine. And let me end with this picture of the brilliant Simonsig 2003 Pinotage that was the perfect ending to this story...