Aidan E.
Designed a mobile app that helps you pick the best gift for your loved ones and reminds you to give them at the right time so you never forget a friend’s birthday ;)
For the last couple of years, I observed many of my friends and colleagues that had difficulty finding good gift ideas when it came to their family and friends' birthday. How many of us only remember our friend's birthdays because Facebook reminds us at the last minute. No time to think let alone buy a good gift, we just have enough time to send a generic birthday message. So I set out to solve this problem to end the pandemic of generic gifts.
How might we design a user experience that helps people easily come up with gift ideas for their loved ones?
I interviewed millennials between the age bracket 22-38. I desired to understand the pain points of these users and the attitudes and behaviors about giving gifts. During these interviews, I realized the older users between the age of 28-34 had more problems buying meaningful gifts.
Through my 7+ user interviews, I came up with a primary and secondary user persona with pain points and goals about finding great gifts.
After creating the user personas, I looked at the goals and frustrations of both types of users. I decided to create an impact matrix to determine which features I should prioritize first.
Based on my user interviews and Impact and Effort Matrix, I decided to focus on the two most important features for the initial prototype that would be most valuable to users and take the least effort to execute.
Based on two usability testing session results, I created the final workflow of the Giftastic mobile application.
For the two wireframe versions, I did 5 usability tests on each of them. During these test sessions, I recorded the user interactions within the prototypes and later went back to fix parts of the design that confused them.
For common features such as adding friends and family or coming up with gift ideas, 2 alternative features have been created. The first is the "Bulk Add" option to add friends and family faster. The second is the "Suggestion Tool" to get new gift ideas.
Users found some button texts and screen text confusing. Thus, they didn't know what to do on a particular screen or what action they could perform.
I wanted Giftastic to give the user a sense of feeling that is engaging and playful. Thus, I relied on warm colors throughout the application. For the logo, I knew from user interviews that "Giftastic" was a catchy name for the brand. Thus, I relied on a wordmark logo with a small gift symbol at top of the character "i".
75% of users mentioned they get gift ideas when they are taking a walk or sitting on public transport. To help them store these ideas, I added the taking notes feature where the users can also set reminders for themselves so they don't forget to buy the gift.
During the discovery interviews, 30% of users mentioned that they would appreciate the ability to ask and get feedback from their loved ones for two reasons. The first is to allow them to share ideas. The second is to make sure they don't buy the same gift as the rest of the group does.
After the first usability tests, 80% of users mentioned that they often struggled coming up with good gift ideas for their loved ones. 50% of the users mentioned also that the gifts they buy usually stem from the interest and the hobbies of the person they will buy the gift for. That is how the suggestion tool idea came to fruition.
I showed the high-fidelity prototype to 5 users for them to test it. Below are some testimonials people gave me.
Now that I have the high-fidelity version of the mobile app, I have 3 goals to improve Giftastic.
1) Prioritize onboarding conversion to test how effective is “bulk add” features for the users to check if manual “add” is too tedious for new users and makes them leave the app.
2) Test how often users rely on the group chat feature to discuss gift ideas with their loved ones to gauge the use of chat functionality inside the application.
3) Test if the users are engaging more on the "Suggestion tool" or manually adding ideas to find out which feature is the popular choice.
