Orangebus

Gift Finder App

I was tasked with designing a proof of concept that could showcase how the gift buying experience could be improved and be made less stressful during busy holiday periods. I came up with an initial UX strategy and process, performed extensive desk research and competitor analysis, and then came up with a few sketches for the UI designs before deciding on and progressing with one in particular and then showcasing the kinds of features a gift purchasing app could provide users.

Problem Statement

Leverage mobile technology to provide an improved and less stressful gift buying experience for all occasions.

Understand and Research

To tackle this problem statement a 4 stage approach was taken. During the Understand and Research phase it was crucial to perform some competitor analysis to see how this problem had already been solved, and more importantly where the current pain points in existing solutions were located. Gathering data from reviews of existing gift purchasing apps was a good insight into what works and what frustrates users. Existing discovery research from focus groups was also provided and a mapping exercise was performed to identify budget vs time restrictions for certain types of users to create a list of four user types. Scenario mapping was then performed using these user types to identify different user journeys and tasks that would need to be performed using the intended solution.

Ideation

During the Ideation phase a workshop was held with a focus group to understand what the key things they consider important during purchasing gifts for friends and family, and some sketches were shared with the group to get some initial feedback and to validate any assumptions derived from the competitor analysis analysis.

Design

During the Design phase further wireframes were created and a clickable prototype was put together so that individuals could click through the screens and perform certain tasks to exolore the proposed functionality.

Implementation and Evaluation

Since this was an initial PoC to validate whether this was a market worth exploring there was no implementation phase, however as part of my presentation I did recommend next steps if this was a project which was going to progress further. These recommendations included performing further user research on a more robust version of the prototype to be able to test more of the scenarios identified in earlier research and to validate any requirements which resulted from the focus groups, to map out and identify further scenarios and to work with a development team to understand if there were any potential technology constraints or limitations which would need to be considered as part of further designs.