The Perfect Gift
Personal Project
Timeline: July 2022
Team of One
Role: Researcher and Designer
Tools: Figma and Whimsical
Project Overview
Searching for meaningful gifts takes hours and sometimes days to find. To make this process faster and less stressful, I created an app to help users pinpoint desirable gifts based on their questionnaire results.
The Problem
How can we help gift buyers find personalized and thoughtful gifts in a short amount of time?
Understanding the User
To validate if there's a necessity for an app/tool to help people find the perfect gift, I developed a survey and received nine participant responses. The survey inquired how frequently participants purchased gifts in a year, what websites they used to shop for gifts, and what made a gift the right gift. In the final survey question, most participants said they were interested in an app/tool to make finding the perfect gift easier. The key findings were used to create the user profile below.
Solution: A Questionnaire App
Using a questionnaire to help users find the perfect gift gives them recommendations they may not have considered before completing the quiz. The act of completing a questionnaire is thoughtful as you carefully consider each response and results will be a set of curated answers. The questionnaire will also dramatically cut the amount of time spent searching for the perfect gift from a few days to a few minutes.
User Flow
For this challenge, I focused on creating the user flow which takes the user from creating a new quiz to purchasing one of the recommended gifts.
Low Fidelity Wireframes
Creating a user flow gave me insight into how the app would progress through each stage in the user journey. From there, I was able to create a few initial wireframes.
This or That Questions
To further calibrate and refine results for the best gift, I devised a small set of additional questions for the user to answer after the questionnaire. These questions have the user pick between two options, which can help the questionnaire weed out bad gift ideas and elevate good gifts from the initial questionnaire.
Implementation of This or That Questions in Prototype
Style Guide
For the visual look and feel of the app, I wanted to ease the stress of users when searching for the perfect present by using a fun and colorful palette. I was inspired by the visual and motion graphic style of Spotify End of the Year Wrapped.
Spotify Wrapped
Prototype
To prevent the quiz from feeling monotonous due to the questions having the same format, I created various ways to display and interact with the quiz.
Takeaway
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Focusing on the user experience and utilizing their inputs from the research phase helped guide me throughout the design process. This led to me to innovate upon my initial wireframe ideas and experiment with the style guide. This is definitely a takeaway that I will continue to implement in future projects.