Recently we had an opportunity to speak with Jarie Maldonado from Jackrabbit Mobile about SWE Wine and Spirits Trivia Quiz

What was your main objective or motivation for creating your mobile app?

We wanted to create a fun way for young people to study wine and spirits.

What is your favorite mobile app to date and which have inspired you?

Two of the apps we were inspired by are also two of our favorites - Duolingo and Flappy Bird.

We love Flappy Bird for its simplicity, addictiveness, and game mechanics - you can see the influence in the way we structure our congratulations screen, as well as how we make it simple for users to keep on taking quizzes with as few taps as possible.

Duolingo, on the other hand, is an app that makes learning fun and appeals to a young audience. Being that these were also two of our primary goals during development, it was a great app to reference. Duolingo also does a great job of reinforcing learning via multiple mediums.

Could you share a challenging factor of the development or marketing process?

One recent challenge has been finding new ways to keep the app fresh for users who have already gone through and passed all 10 levels in each of the 10 categories.

We are lucky to have an extremely active user base, and one request from our power users has been for new ways to test their knowledge. Adding more questions to the app is labor intensive and expensive, so our focus as of late has been finding more new ways to mix up the same content in a way that feels new.

One tactic we're experimenting with is adding a Mastery Challenge for each of the levels - something users would only unlock after they have completed all the normal levels. Normally, a user only needs to get 7/10 questions right to complete any given level, but when taking the Mastery Challenge users would only pass if they get all 10/10 questions correct.

We're also thinking about adding Streak Mode (where a user tries to go as long as they can without getting a question wrong) and a Grab Bag category (which would pick a random 10 questions out of any of the 1,000 in our question bank).

What is the coolest or most innovative feature of your app?

What really differentiates our app from the other wine and spirits educational apps out there is our breadth of information covered (we have more than 1,000 questions over 10 categories). For people studying for their sommelier certification, the SWE Wine and Spirits Quiz is a fun, free way to refresh your knowledge while on the go. It's more convenient than whipping out a full fledged study guide, and feels more like a game than it does like actually studying.

What features do you hope to roll out to your app in the future?

Our focus right now is making SWE Wine Quiz a better and more comprehensive tool for preparing for the CSS or CSW. Our Here are a few of the user stories at the top of our backlog:

• As a user taking a quiz, I want there to be more variety in the questions asked on any given level.
• As a user, I want to be able to set reminders for myself to study at a time of day that is convenient for me.
• As a user on my phone I want to be able to easily read reference material to further understand the questions being asked.
• As a user who has completed a lot of quizzes, I want to be able to track my progress to getting 100% of the questions correct in a category.

Do you plan on releasing your app to other platforms as well?

Yes! SWE Wine Quiz is currently on both iOS and Android. We may land on the Windows Phone in the future, but at the moment our focus is on making the app a better educational tool for aspiring sommeliers on iOS and Android.

Were there any unexpected surprises post-release of your app?

One thing that really surprised us was that one of our most loved features ended up being something we never even considered a feature - namely, reminders for when live trainings were happening with expert sommelier Jane Nichols.

From our experience reminders are one of the best ways to reactivate and engage your user base, but we didn't want to be an app that blasted users with annoying, out-of-context notifications. We were thrilled to find our users not only found our notifications useful - they were one of the top 3 app benefits users were listing in their App Store reviews as well.

Users were actually asking to receive reminders more often, and we were happy oblige, especially since it required zero engineering work. Although reminders were at the periphery of our main use case (educating users through wine and spirits trivia), because of the huge positive response to the training reminders, we'll be working in more real-time features that supplement the live training experience in future releases.

If you could describe your app in ONE word, what would it be and why?

Educational

You can view SWE Wine and Spirits Trivia Quiz here