Dispense has been acquired by Alpine IQ 🎉 🤝
Dispense has been acquired by Alpine IQ 🎉 🤝
More data for consumers does not always equate to better shopping experiences. Data has to be digestible and actionable for it to be effective and translate into sales.
When designing for cannabis customers, it's important to consider the range of personas and experiences: From the cannabis connoisseur who knows exactly what they want and understands cannabis data, to the canna-curious who may be overwhelmed by all of the acronyms.
Is 25% THC in flower a high or low amount?
The cannabis-connoisseur knows what's up.
The canna-curious, might guess that 25% THC is low because it's out of 100%, right? Oops, welcome to the moon. 🌚
To help interpret THC and CBD values, we added a graph with low/medium/high indicators on our menu for flower, pre-rolls, and concentrates. Since we pull total mg for edibles and not dosage amounts from the POS, we did not add this feature for that category.
While most consumers are focused on THC and CBD levels, there is a growing number of educated consumers who are all about the terps.
Terpenes are naturally occurring compounds in marijuana that contribute to different strains' unique flavor profiles and enhance its therapeutic benefits.
Dispense pulls terpene data from many of our POS partners to display in our retailers' menus.
The first piece of this feature was figuring out what terpenes we should include in our list. While this may seem straightforward, there are lots of different terpenes and no standard of "these are the ones found in cannabis". Different labs test for different terpenes, other cannabis software companies had their own internal lists (but didn't always overlap).
After moving through many sources, we landed on the 16 that seemed to be the most common in cannabis.
We added a description to each terpene to help educate consumers. Each terpene listed includes a flavor and at least one effect or feeling.
This was also not the easiest exercise, some terpenes have lots of flavors and effects, and each source cited different attributes (only sometimes overlapping), so narrowing it down to a concise bit of text took some time and filtering.
You can see our terpene list with their descriptions.
The first piece of design work involved here was creating an icon for each terpene to best visually describe its flavor:
Now on to how to best display the terpene amounts.
Pie graphs are good for data that adds up to 100%. This is not the case for terpenes, so we passed on the pie.
What consumers really need to know is which terpenes are present and which ones are the dominant ones. Thus, we decided on using horizontal bars to give a visual indication of the terpene amount relative to each other.
At Dispense, we're focused on designing experiences that are beneficial for both retailers and their customers. We have fun turning complex data into actionable insights. Join us!
