A mobile application designed to make giving and receiving gifts easier.
TL;DR: A Summary
Few gift exchange platforms exist that allow users to keep their shipping address private. Existing platforms operate under the assumption that users will be able to exchange their gifts in-person or are comfortable with sharing their shipping address to their gifter.
WishGift is a mobile app designed to not only streamline the gift exchanging process but also give users a way to safely purchase and send gifts to others without needing to exchange personal details.
Role
UX Designer & Researcher
Timeline
January 2024 - March 2024
Background
This project was inspired by the lack of alternatives to Throne Gifts, a platform “that allows [content creators] to create a wishlist to share with [their] audience while protecting [their] privacy” (Streamlabs, 2024). Through Throne, senders do not need the recipient’s address in order to send gifts, a concept that has changed the way content creators of any size can connect with their fans.
Understanding the Problem Space
General Problems of Interest
Choosing gifts for someone can be tricky, no matter how well you know the other person.
How do you figure out what the best gift to give is?
Will the recipient like what you’ve chosen?
How can you easily find out what the other person likes without spoiling the surprise?
There’s few options for safe, private gift exchanging.
What if you’re receiving a gift from someone you’d prefer to not have your address, like in the case of a content creator with a fan?
What if your group of non-creator friends from Discord just want to exchange gifts with each other?
What other alternatives exist out there for netizens who want to connect through gifting?
Meeting the Users
User interviews with 3 small content creators and 3 non-creators revealed the following key findings:
Online Friendships — All participants had online friends whom they only interact with online and have never met in-person. This suggested that non-content creators form meaningful relationships with online peers just like small-content creators and bridged the gap between these two groups of people.
Mailing Gifts vs. Giving In-Person — Half of the participants did their gifting mostly in-person while the other half gave and received gifts equally both in-person and through the mail.
Choosing a Gift — When asked how they went about choosing gifts for others, participants mentioned four criteria: recipient’s personality, budget, gift practicality, and recipient’s wishlist.
User Pains About Giving & Receiving Gifts
When asked what they disliked about giving and receiving gifts, participants said the following:
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Difficulty Choosing the Gift
Finding the right gift for others can be difficult due to being unfamiliar with the other person and/or the vast number of options available for a gifts, which can be overwhelming.
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Receiving Bad Gifts
Some gifts are just bad, and participants are just stuck with accepting the gift gracefully. Some people just do not put a lot of thought into their gifts or fail to do their gift shopping in time, which results in bad gifts.
Knowing this, how might we…
help users feel comfortable sending and receive gifts from online friends?
help people who gift choose a gift the recipient will like?
minimize the chance of getting a bad gift for recipients?
Scoping Out the Competition
Two key findings were discovered during competitive analysis of other gift exchange related mobile apps currently on the market.
There are apps that will only generate names for a gift exchange, only acts as a gift registry, or do a combination of these two things.
Figure 1. Venn diagram comparing the functions of various competitors.
Users need to share their mailing address to their sender. Alternatively, the recipient’s address remains private to the sender.
Figure 2. Venn diagram comparing mailing address privacy for users.
Prioritization & Information Architecture
Understanding Project Goals
Three main goals were established for this project. These goals went beyond the design of the product itself and took into account user goals, business goals, and technical considerations.
To increase the chance of getting someone a gift they’ll actually like and/or use
To stand out from direct & indirect competition with a unique feature
To create a satisfactory, enjoyable, and easy to understand experience using the mobile application
Feature Prioritization
Ideas were generated for potential features to include in the upcoming product’s design. After prioritizing which features to include in the minimal viable product (MVP), the following features were considered high priority.
User Profile
Allows users to access information such as purchase history and curate a custom experience based on user settings. Public profiles display a bio and the user’s created wishlists.
In-App Gift Search
Allow users to search in-app for gifts from partner stores to add to their wishlist.
Create Multiple Wishlists
Allows users to create different wishlists for different occasions or for different purposes, which adds more possibility for organization for those who may want it.
Hidden Shipping Address
Prevents gifters from seeing and requiring the receiver's address during the purchasing and shipping process.
In-App Checkout
Allows for gifters to directly purchase a gift through the app and have it be shipped to the recipient as opposed to buying the gift from a third-party and shipping it themselves.
Bringing Ideas to Life: Wireframing
Low-fidelity Wireframes
Full preview of all low-fidelity wireframes can be accessed here.
Figure 3. Sketches of WishGift’s home and explore screen and navigation bar.
Figure 4. Sketches of WishGift’s user profile and wishlist screens.
Figure 5. Sketches of WishGift’s checkout screen.
Mid-fidelity Wireframes
Full preview of all mid-fidelity wireframes can be accessed here.
Figures 6 & 7. Mid-fidelity wireframes of WishGift’s home & post-wishlist creation screens.
Figure 8. Mid-fidelity wireframe of a product page.
Figure 9 & 10. Mid-fidelity wireframes of WishGift’s cart & checkout screen.
First Impressions: Mid-Fidelity Usability Testing
At a Glance
A five-point difficulty scale was used to measure ease of use during usability testing. Once participants had finished a task, they were asked to rate the difficulty of completing that task on a scale of one (1) to five (5) with one (1) being “very easy.” Mid-fidelity testing participants were asked to complete the following three tasks:
Create a wishlist
Add an item to a wishlist
Purchase a gift off someone’s wishlist
Results & User Suggestions
A full summary of the mid-fidelity usability test results can be viewed here. Users noted the following during testing:
a clean and easy to navigate UI with clear labels
how the multiple cart feature would be a timesaver and a convenient way to keep items organized without having to move items in and out of the cart when it comes time to purchase
Notable suggestions from users on how to potentially improve the multiple cart system included:
Giving the user the option to choose which cart they are viewing rather than displaying all active carts at once upon checking out
Providing a list of active carts preceding an overview of the selected cart, which then leads the user to the checkout pages
“Maybe before the individual cart page there can be a page where it’s a list of the carts with just the name of the person, # of items, and cost with a button (or the whole card) leading to the cart? (UberEats and probably other food delivery apps something like this)”
Meet WishGift: The Brand
WishGift was chosen as the brand name to reflect the idea of making a wish and having that wish come true through a gift. Brand values that were chosen to represent the WishGift were: thoughtful, heart, joy, wonder, whimsical, and dreams.
The brand’s color palette was inspired by the classic and familiar Christmas palette of red and green. True reds and greens were avoided, however, to limit WishGift’s association with Christmas, since the app is meant to be used year-round. This reflects the reality of gifting: gifts can be exchanged no matter the time of year. Additionally, the inclusion of the pink in the brand’s palette reflects the brand’s value of “heart.”
Figure 11. WishGift UI kit
A Wish(Gift) Come True: High-fidelity Prototyping
A few key screens of the high-fidelity prototype before usability testing are shown below. A full preview of all screens used in the usability test can be found here.
Figure 12 & 13. Hi-fidelity wireframes of WishGift’s home & post-wishlist creation screens.
Figure 14. Mid-fidelity wireframe of a product page.
Figure 15 & 16. Mid-fidelity wireframes of WishGift’s cart & checkout screen.
ABC Testing
Two other variations for the cart screen were also designed based on user’s feedback during mid-fidelity usability testing. Version B includes a dropdown menu to allow for users to select which cart to view; Version C shows a summary of each cart before directing users to the cart they select. These versions were included in the high-fidelity usability test to gauge users’ preference.
Version B
Version C
Iterative Design
A New Iteration of WishGift’s Design
Based on what was observed during usability testing and the suggestions for improvements from users, the following changes were made to WishGift’s design.
Size and spacing of prototype elements were adjusted to improve visibility and to help WishGift resemble popular modern day apps more.
Some adjustments included:
a) the size of the icons and font in the bottom navigation bar
b) the size and shadows of the dropdown menu of the cart
Original
a)
b)
Iteration
a)
b)
The addition of features or information that would make shopping with WishGift even more convenient for users.
This included:
c) A way for users to change their payment information right before pressing checkout.
Original
c)
Iteration
c)
Second Run: High-Fidelity Usability Testing
At a Glance
High-fidelity usability testing consisted of asking participants to perform the following of tasks:
Create a new wishlist
Add an item to a wishlist
Purchase a gift for someone else (Version A, B, and C).
The last task of purchasing a gift was performed three times in order to test three different versions of the cart screen prior to the checkout screen. Once participants had finished a task, they were asked to rate the difficulty of completing that task on a scale of one (1) to five (5) with one being “very easy.”
Results
A full summary of the high-fidelity usability test results can be viewed here.
Users emphasized the ease of navigating WishGift’s app and noted how their experience using WishGift felt similar to using other shopping apps, like Amazon, due to WishGift’s implementation of familiar design patterns for navigation. Additionally, users expressed positive emotions regarding WishGfit’s color scheme, branding, and user interface and described WishGift’s brand using adjectives like cute, fun, inviting and welcoming.
Out of the 3 cart versions tested, the most preferred was Version B, the cart screen with the dropdown menu. Users liked being able to control what was on screen: either the cart of their choosing, or all carts at once.
Conclusion
Final Thoughts
WishGift is a mobile application designed to not only make gift exchanging less stressful and difficult, but also safer for those in need of an alternative to PO boxes and existing competitors. The current version of WishGift allows for users to perform basic actions necessary to save items and purchase items for others, but there is a lot of potential to expand the application to give users more perks to using the app.
One feature that could be explored in the future includes the ability to add other users as friends. This would allow users a way to easily access the wishlists of loved ones or close friends without having to keep a list of public profile links. Moreover, the addition of a formal “Secret Santa” system would expand the app into something that would set it apart from competitors, since no one app or website exists that allows for users to both set up a Secret Santa exchange and send gifts; typically, for competitors, it’s one or the other.
During the creation of WishGift, many other exploratory ideas outside of the scope of this project arose. This speaks to the scalability of WishGift, and with how important gift exchanges are to many in the world, WishGift could change how people shop for their gifts and send them to loved ones.