Context: A case study undertaken to learn UX techniques. I investigated the users of an imaginary gift tracking and recommendation app called Giftly and their scenarios and task flows.
Goals: To gain a better understanding of the user-centered design process by diving into specific techniques.
Tools Used: Images shown here were done in Illustrator. Other work not shown included hand sketching and Post-Its. So many Post-Its.
Additional information: Buying presents can be a lot of work, so the Giftly App (like others already in the market — but I’ll leave the competition analysis to the Marketing Team for now) seeks to make that job easier and maybe even fun. Giftly asks for basic information about your giftees and offers suggestions, including a VIP personalized option for those willing to pay.
Impact of User Centered Design Process: Thinking through the details of an app this complicated seems utterly overwhelming, but the UX process makes it very clear how to start and how to stay focused on the end goal — how it will work for real users. While it’s a little difficult to do this in a case study format with purely imaginary users, it has been a great learning experience to see how starting with personas and working through storyboards and wireframes makes the initial mockup stage feel much more grounded and smoother.
These personas (above), representing four key user groups, helped give shape to my case study investigations. I prepared these persona cards as a reference and to help give them life and make it easier for me to imagine the kinds of choices and decisions they would make as I worked on the other steps in the process.
The charts above show the gift giving patterns for the four personas over the past calendar year (month by month) in an easy to compare visual shorthand.
Above are some very preliminary prototypical wireframes for Giftly screens to help test out ideas about organization and structure, and begin conversations around design, accessibility, and user testing, among other things.
An initial mockup of one screen of the Giftly app (the browse additional gift suggestions shown to persona Rebecca before she chooses the category “Kites” in the fifth panel of the storyboard). The image was assembled in Illustrator.
This storyboard following the scenario of one persona, Rebecca, browsing for a gift for her niece with the Giftly app. This was created after a task analysis exercise was undertaken and was sketched in Illustrator.
An initial version of an experience map organizes the flow of user objectives and reactions at different stages of using the app, and highlights a good number of pain points, which present opportunities for refining and developing the app.
