Gift cards are a popular and convenient choice, but they often feel impersonal, lacking the emotional connection of a thoughtful gift. This project focused on enhancing digital gift cards by introducing personalization features, allowing users to add custom messages, photos, and videos. By addressing key user pain points, the goal was to make digital gifting more meaningful while maintaining ease of use.
End-to-end product design and worked closely with engineering to craft the gifting experience in detail.
Solo designer, Head of Product, and 2 Engineers.
April 2024 - August 2024
To understand user behavior, the product head conducted 40 in-depth interviews with gifters and recipients. Afterward, I reviewed the transcripts using Otter.ai, synthesizing their feedback to uncover pain points and needs.
Collaborating with the product head, we conducted a data analysis workshop, grouping direct quotes into themes. This workshop allowed us to identify common threads across users and align on key takeaways.
I developed empathy map to consolidate user insights, mapping their thoughts, feelings, actions, and words. This helped the team empathize with the emotional disconnect users experienced and informed the next steps in ideation.
To pinpoint market opportunities, I analyzed competitors like Givingli, Shutterfly, and Etsy, focusing on their strengths and weaknesses in personalization, convenience, and emotional impact.
Digital gifting platforms often lack personalization features that make gifts feel unique and emotionally meaningful. User interviews revealed a strong desire for tools to add a personal touch, such as custom messages or media, while competitive analysis highlighted the absence of intuitive and seamless personalization options in the market.
How might we enable users to easily personalize digital gift cards to create a more meaningful and emotionally resonant gifting experience?
With the key insights and competitive gaps defined, I facilitated an ideation workshop with the product head to brainstorm solutions.
To translate ideas into actionable features, I used the MoSCoW prioritization method, focusing on feasibility and user impact.
I created detailed user flows to map the sender’s and recipient’s journeys. These flows were presented to the team, where I incorporated feedback from both the product and technical teams.
With feedback and constraints in mind, I created medium-fidelity wireframe variants for the two key screens: adding a message and media, and scheduling the gift card.
A remote moderated usability test was conducted on the iOS beta version via TestFlight, involving 10 external participants representative of the target audience. The objective was to evaluate the intuitiveness, efficiency, and emotional impact of the gift personalization and scheduling features.
I finalized the visual design, ensuring consistency with the brand style guide, and collaborated with developers to build the feature.
