UX Design Project: Lean UX Crash Course
Amazingly enough, we just wrapped week 7 of 10 in our User Experience Design Immersive at General Assembly. I can’t believe how much we’ve learned in this short amount of time, and now we’re in the home stretch!
After a two-week project working on a team to design for a Chicago cultural institution, I was curious to see what our next project would be. The cultural briefs we had for Project 3 were so broad and before we were assigned this project I remember thinking, “Surely Project 4 will give us a clearer direction.” Why I thought that I do not know, but as you can probably guess I was laughably incorrect.
Project 4 focused on lean UX and shipping designs. We were given four topic areas to choose from, and from there we had to decide where in that area we would narrow our focus. We were then supposed to conduct research and interviews to find user pain points, and propose a new product that we would design from the ground up. No problem, right? :)
Our Topic: Gift Giving
Our (very broad) brief: “So many emotions, motivations, and traditions are tied up in gift-giving. This topic is about understanding the functionality and emotions of people around gift giving and identifying an opportunity area to improve upon. You will then be designing an experience that would improve this.”
This project came up right around the holidays, so to save ourselves from thinking about every gift for every possible gift-giving situation, we decided to narrow in on holiday gift-giving on a budget. With money being tight as it is during any normal time of year, we thought investigating budget at such a high-pressure and generally stressful time would yield some strong insights and reveal an opportunity area to design for.
Research Findings and Key Insights
We structured our initial research around the idea of budgeting, but also asked questions regarding what people enjoy about gift giving, how many people they were buying for overall, and what, if anything, would make the holiday shopping experience easier. After surveying around 50 people and interviewing a dozen in person, we found a few pieces of information that were vital to our final product:
- 56% of our survey respondents and interviewees said that the “most frustrating” part of the holiday shopping process was coming up with ideas. While we nudged on budget to see if that was in fact more important (as we originally hypothesized), our users insisted that idea generation was one of their biggest hurdles.
- Additionally, 40% of our users said that the person, rather than the budget, was the most important factor in buying a gift.
With this new knowledge, we started to reframe our project. Ideas and people were more important than budget, but people still found themselves with a certain amount of stress near the finish line of holiday time. What was causing this stress? Procrastination.
We heard from multiple interviewees about finding just the “right” gift for someone. But they were quick to point out that they weren’t putting in the same amount of time, effort, or money for everyone. People were willing to bend all over to get what they deemed perfect gifts for a core group of people, but beyond that was when holiday panic started to set in. What do you get for people you don’t see that often, or don’t know that well but for whatever circumstances you need a gift?
We knew now that whatever we designed wasn’t going to be for this core group, as finding the right gift is very individual to each gift giver. But this procrastination tendency gave us something new to think about. Could we improve on that tendency somehow and alleviate holiday stress? This led straight into our second key insight.
For every story of procrastination that we heard from our users, we also heard about the accompanying sense of guilt, the feeling that they’d let someone down, or disappointment that they felt overall with not giving a great gift. These feelings came from not getting a gift they’d thought of previously but didn’t act on, waiting until the last minute and overspending, or just not giving a gift at all. In each case, our users were aware that they had fallen short in a previous season and they wanted this year to be different.
Our Proposed Design
With everything we learned, we saw designing a tool for two kinds of people.
- Our first user was a procrastinator because they didn’t know where to start. Stores overwhelmed them with many choices, and they found themselves getting easily distracted by other things. Gift buying was never at the front of their mind, it was always something they would get to “eventually.” Their procrastination came from fear of making the wrong choice, so they didn’t make any choice. This led to disappointment in themselves for not starting earlier, and we knew that if this user could be nudged a little toward a plan, that maybe this cycle could be stopped. This user needed a place to find ideas, a way to keep themselves accountable and plan ahead, and encouragement and motivation to turn their procrastination to action.
- Our second user was a procrastinator with a little more foresight than our first user. They had ideas for what they wanted to get the people on their general list, but they wouldn’t automatically act on them, thinking that there was always still time. Thinking about the purchase was almost as good in their mind as making it, but of course this is where the trouble came in. While their intentions were always good and they sometimes even had specific products in mind, not adding gift buying time into their schedule and planning led them to scrambling at the last minute, only to find that some of their original ideas were no longer available, so now they were stuck. This user needed a place to track ideas, and then the same two pieces that our first user needed: accountability and planning options, and encouragement to make that procrastination a thing of the past.
Prototype and Features
Thoughtfull gives our user a place to track ideas that they already have, a place to save possible choices, and an inspiration area that uses a Pinterest-type mood board model to curate images that speak to a user. Once enough images are selected that evoke a certain mood or tone, Thoughtfull will generate a list of recommendations that users can purchase. Thoughtfull will redirect a user to purchase from each individual site, but will still allow them to save possible purchases.
The major selling point of Thoughtfull is the planning aspect and communication options. A gift reminder calendar can be linked right to a user’s personal phone calendar so that the act of thinking about purchasing a gift is not enough. The calendar integrates the purchase process into a user’s daily schedule, just as it would a meeting or an important work presentation. From there, the app notifies the user via phone notifications to keep them on schedule. Tone is always encouraging and nudges toward an action, whether that’s crossing something off a list or setting a new reminder, so that gift giving remains an active process until complete. Users can set up how often they want to receive notifications and the kind of language used, so that the app doesn’t become an annoyance, but rather an encouraging tool as intended.
Thoughtfull won’t solve everything about procrastination around the holidays, but from what we observed, it’s a start. That carryover disappointment from the previous holiday season was an exceptionally strong motivator for our users, and if we could use that feeling for good and for positive action, rather than guilt, we would be helping out a large number of people.
For the Future
Thoughtfull currently serves as a recommender and directs a user to a third party for purchase. In order to have products to populate recommendations and to bring in revenue, Thoughtfull plans to utilize affiliate marketing and brand partnerships to grow our presence.
We’d also like to expand the scope of Thoughtfull outside the realm of holiday gift giving and also include occasions like anniversaries, birthdays, and other special events.
Addressing the procrastination problem could be just the beginning for Thoughtfull. What other emotions could we tap in to? First thoughts were the option to add cards to gifts, gift delivery or in-store shopping assistance to reduce stress even more, and the chance to customize inspiration boards around most-shopped stores or websites so that recommendations could be ultra-tailored to each specific user. Overall we were pleased to find such a specific problem that we could actually design for, and we hope to flesh out this project further in the future.
UPDATE January 4th, 2017: This project was featured by InVision on their Twitter. Thanks, folks!
