Making Meaningful Gifting Easy
SENTIMENT– CASE STUDY
THE MISSION
Help improve the gift giving experience, and help "gifters" find more meaningful gifts.
PROJECT NAME
SENTIMENT
THE OUTCOME
Created a user-friendly, native mobile app that helps individuals pick the right gifts for others, while receiving better gifts themselves. The app would allow users to indicate their preferences and wants, while being able to view the same information about their friends.
ROLE
Lead Researcher, Lead Designer, Project Manager
THE IMPACT
35% Easier
57% Faster
58% More Direct
to 100%
As far as completing the tasks given to them, usability testers performed better in every aspect when using our proposed site compared to the original.
Sentiment is a concept app to help people that are sick of giving and receiving socks and gift cards for the 5th year in a row.
What We Did
Create a concept app from scratch to improve the gift giving experience for both parties.
1. Put Reasons For Gifting Front And Center
To make it easy for Sentiment users to stay up to date with upcoming occasions, we placed upcoming occasions on the dashboard, along with a mini friend's list that shows your friends that have upcoming events.
2. Allowed Users To Provide Info On Themselves and Friends
We created a profile page that helps inspire "gifters" to get their friend a more meaningful gift. It focuses on the person's general interests, specific preferences, products or experiences they explicitly said they wanted, and AI generated recommendations based on their profile. For those that like to scroll, an AI generated mood board will appear below. Friends are encouraged to add more details to each other's pages to help others with their gifting struggles.
3. Provide Options For How To Handle A Product Or Experience
While some perfect gifts might be within your budget, some might be too expensive to purchase alone. We provided users the ability to purchase alone or create a Group Gift which other friends could contribute to. To help build up a user's profile for others, it can be helpful to add an item to the user's Already Experienced List or Wishlist.
The Impact
For task completion, usability testers performed significantly better in all aspects using our redesigned app compared to the first iteration.
14% Easier
29% Faster
37% More Direct
Scope Of Work
The scope being explored is for mobile app applications, specifically apps utilized by hybrid workers. We were able to choose a problem we wanted to tackle. We decided on trying to fix bad gift giving. The gifting process is often complicated, time consuming and stressful for people.
Our Approach
PHASE 1 –PROBLEM SPACE
Problem Space & Focus
Given that we were creating an app from scratch, we had to start off with an initial hypothesis and assumptions to guide our work.
Initial Hypothesis
The gifting process is often complicated, time consuming and stressful for people.
Assumptions
oWe learned about their proposal woes and the types of people their consultants are.
Problem Statement
Our team was seeking to validate or invalidate our problem statement - How might we create a more meaningful way for people to give and receive gifts based on their needs and taste?
PHASE 2 –USER RESEARCH
User Research
To better solve gift-giving problems we utilized a few different methods that helped us to understand what makes a good gift,
what makes a good "gifter", and pain points in gift giving.
We ran:
User Interviews
User
Persona
User
Journey
Usability Testing
User Interviews
We interviewed 5 different gift givers/receivers, and asked them all the same questions to uncover trends in what was causing them the most issues with gift giving. We then grouped our observations together in an affinity map to extract some key insights to help with our design process later on.
We discovered that:
- A good gift requires thought, intention, value usefulness, or a desire to add something to the receiver's life; it does not need to be expensive
- The best gift givers seem to be able to read the recipient's mind, by knowing their wishes, needs, etc.
- Pooling money is great in theory but hard to organize and manage
- People expect amore thoughtful gift from those they are closest with
- Gifts like cash or giftcards are safe and easy options, but feel impersonal, and transactional
Who We Are Serving
After conducting user interviews we further consolidated our findings into a user persona that helped focus our design process on the key needs of our target audience.
View Full Persona
oWe learned about their proposal woes and the types of people their consultants are.
The primary pain points we identified were:
Sometimes recruiters don't communicate with him after he applies to jobs
Proposal prompts are often either unclear, too long, repetitive, or only partially-relevant
He is not tech savvy, and has trouble navigating Clora's website
Day In The Life Of Our Target User
We also wanted to imagine what a typical gifting experience with Sentiment would be like for Eddie. We created a representation of the "day in the life of Eddie" to highlight specific pain points in the gifting process we could improve upon.
The primary pain points we identified were:
- The application and proposal process is tedious and lengthy, find ways to break it up or make filling information in faster
- Keep consultants better informed of the status of their applications
- Clora can guide users through the proposal process in a way that keeps them engaged
Our New Focus Coming Out Of Research
What We Found In Our Research
After considering all the data points, trends, insights and mapping techniques we were able to ascertain that our users expected people who knew them best to be able to provide the most meaningful gifts. This wasn’t a result of who the gift giver was but rather the fact that these intimate relationships produced valuable information about a users habits, needs, wants, behaviors, etc.
Our Intended Audience
The person sick of giving or receiving impersonal or mediocre gifts.
Problem We Found In Our Research
How might we create a more meaningful way for people to give and receive gifts based on their needs and taste?
Opportunity/Goal
Provide hybrid workers the ability to foster and maintain more personal connections with co-workers to increase work-life balance and clear communication.
User Testing With Mid-Fid And Hi-Fi Rd. 1 Designs
User Testing Tasks
oWe learned about their proposal woes and the types of people their consultants are.
Findings From User Testing
We learned a ton from our usability tests but here are just a few notes:
- Users were drawn to product images and looking for search functionality when told to add items to their Wishlist, so let's add an intuitive '+' symbol to add a selected product
- Remove shopping and browsing aspects of the app and focus instead on giving relevant suggestions based on data points collected on each user
- The 'About [PERSON]' button on the profile page was not being immediately identified as a clickable, most users were immediately drawn to the photography
- Change the slightly confusing taxonomy and hierarchy of buttons on the product pages
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PHASE 3–DESIGN
Research to Design
Taking our insights gleaned from business and user research, we came up with the following features.
Insights
»
Features
Thoughtful gifts acknowledge recipients needs, wants and interests
»
Informed gift giving through socially collaborative profile building
Wishlists are sometimes a necessary evil at the expense of fun and surprise
»
Each profile will have a public Wishlist that all friends can view and contribute to, but the owner can only view their own additions
Pooling money can make for a better gift but logistics can make it not worthwhile
»
Provide a simple and seamless experience when pooling money for bigger gifts
There are many ways people keep track of holidays and other gifting occasions
»
Provide a simple and efficient way of keeping track of gifting occasions
User Testing With Mid-Fid And Hi-Fi Rd. 1 Designs
User Testing Tasks
oWe learned about their proposal woes and the types of people their consultants are.
Findings From User Testing
We learned a ton from our usability tests but here are just a few notes:
- Users were drawn to product images and looking for search functionality when told to add items to their Wishlist, so let's add an intuitive '+' symbol to add a selected product
- Remove shopping and browsing aspects of the app and focus instead on giving relevant suggestions based on data points collected on each user
- The 'About [PERSON]' button on the profile page was not being immediately identified as a clickable, most users were immediately drawn to the photography
- Change the slightly confusing taxonomy and hierarchy of buttons on the product pages
HiFi Designs - Round 1 Vs. Round 2 Changes
Home Page / Important Information
What app am I using again?- Unclear what page the user is looking at
- Can't quickly reference a friend's profile
Added a Sentiment logo for app recognition- Page indicators on the bottom Nav
- Added a scrollable friend's list to the home page
Unclear Next Steps
- The 'About [NAME]' section is not recognizable as a CTA
- The '+' functionality does not allow for easily adding to the Wishlist
- No way for users to indicate whether they are especially close to this friend
- Changed 'About' section to give a sneak peek of what's inside
- Changed functionality of '+' button to allow for easy selection of items
- Added a heart icon in the top right that can be selected to indicate that this is a 'best friend'
Tedious Proposals
- Filling in the number of people and date was too early in the purchasing process
- Unclear positioning and coloring of buttons puts preference over Booking On AirBnb instead of doing a Group Gift
- No way to see other similar experiences that would be suggested for this friend
- Moved filling in the number of people and date to later pages after an initial selection is made
- Both purchase buttons are colored and on the same level to emphasize they are similar but different
- Added a 'Suggested Experiences' section below that can be added to to help the recommendation algorithm for your friend
The Impact Of Our Changes
For task completion, usability testers performed significantly better in all aspects using our proposed site compared to the original.
14% Easier
29% Faster
37% More Direct
Introducing Sentiment!
Lets take a final, step-by-step look at the app we made.
Learn About A Friend's Preferences
Gift givers would often stay away from gifting more personal gifts if they weren't sure of someone's specific preferences or interests.
Now, gift givers can check a friend's profile and their friend's self-added preferences and interests. Say goodbye to gifting something in the wrong size or a brand they don't like.
Best of all, no need to ask the giftee about their preferences and ruin the surprise.
Easily Find, Book, And Manage A Group Experience Gift
Gift givers mentioned avoiding giving experiences since they could be hard to manage, especially in groups. In testing we identified issues with the taxonomy and flow of our original designs. So we simplified things!
Now, you can choose a gift for a friend, and select 'Group Gift' which will allow you to easily send a payment request to specific friends that would like to get in on the gift.
Indicating Your Wants
Gift receivers loved having their mind read, but that rarely happened unless they explicitly handed someone a Wishlist, which would remove the element of surprise.
We addressed this issue by allowing users to add to the their own and other's Wishlists which sit on their profile page.
Next Steps & Follow-On Opportunities
Next Steps
Given more time, we identified several areas for further improvement:
- Additional testing with color accessibility
- Testing with taxonomy
- Consider API integrations and explore partners to leverage Sentiment's capabilities with a larger economic ecosystem
- Consider adding feedback capabilities to help recommendation algorithms improve
- Rely less on affiliate links and develop a point of scale capability