Client: Zazzle Length: 8 months Team: Rhythm Agarwal, Danielle Dodo, Nancy Duan, Joyce Ker, Sachin Nayak
Project Brief
We created Momento for Zazzle, to create an engaging and personalized experience for people to emotionally bond with Zazzle as a life style brand 10 years in the future. Momento is a service concept that helps people to appreciate the relationships in their life through active reminiscing and gift giving. Our deliverables, were proof of concept and a suggested a timeline for deploying Momento.
Our Final Service
We created Momento, a service that uses active reminiscing and gift giving to help people to appreciate their relationships with the people in their life.
By helping people to actively reminisce about their relationships, people are able to better value their relationships and the times they spent together. This simple act of appreciation can help strengthen existing relationships and lead to further appreciation.
These strengthened relationships can create more moments for people to cherish, which Zazzle can capitalize on and help build more value for those shared moments.
Our concept video to show how Momento would work.
Timeline
Year 1
We envision our service being integrated within the current Zazzle web and mobile platforms to help users in the gift giving process. By introducing Momento to people who already are thinking about giving a gift we can show the value and delight in the service, thereby introducing the behavior of giving a gift on a memory.
Currently Zazzle has a Gifts section on the both the web and mobile platforms, Momento can be integrated here to help with the gift ideation.
Year 2-3
After people adopt the service and have that behavior of giving a gift on a memory, Momento will become its own standalone service, whether as an app or another medium.
This video is a demonstration of how a stand alone Momento app might manifest and is only a demonstration of the concept.
Year 10
Zazzle is no longer product-focused but people focused, bringing relationships and stories to the forefront. Zazzle will help people focus on and appreciate their relationships, thereby becoming synonymous with strong personal relationships. This will accelerate people’s understanding and appreciation of Zazzle.
In 10 years, Zazzle will have implemented Momento as a service, have created a new behavior, and changed the way people think about their relationships.
Value to Users
Thoughtful and meaningful gifts - People can now easily showcase the story and meaning behind each product.
Appreciate their relationships better - People appreciate their relationships through validation, by looking back at shared experiences.
Showcase time and effort - People can show how much time and effort they put in a gift.
Give gifts that evoke emotion - People can evoke more positive emotions in the recipient, like nostalgia, friendship, and love.
Value to Zazzle
Ideation on Zazzle - Zazzle experience is now extended to include the ideation process.
Reduced anxiety in the personalization process - The focus is shifted from the stressful gift selection to reminiscing about the relationship. By providing context with the gifts, the burden of context is taken off of the gift giver and gift receiver.
A people-centric brand experience - With an experience aimed at strengthening relationships, Zazzle will go beyond its current product centric view.
Contributions
As a product designer, I engaged in the entire process of research and design. I was also responsible for handling all the communication with external stakeholders such as our client Zazzle.
• Planning, executing, and analyzing UX Research; Secondary research, Fly-on-the-wall, Interviews (competitior, expert, hallway, stakeholder, customer, exploratory, etc.), Empathy exercise, Analogous domain analysis, Affinity diagramming and Six hat thinking.
• Ideation, creating and executing hypothesis validation, and iterating on concept tests; Visioning, Storyboarding/Speed dating, Hallway interviews, User enactments, Concept testing, Wizard of Oz, Creating user flows, Wire framing and Rapid prototyping.
• Worked on deliverables writing the content, working on the video, and critiquing the final visual design of deliverables.
Research
Methods: Empathy Exercises, Expert Interviews, Exploratory Interviews, Analogous Domain Analyses, Hallway Interviews, Stakeholder Interviews, Co-design Exercise, Zazzle customer Interviews, Fly-on-the-wall observations, Field Visits
When we were presented with this problem, we needed to first build an understanding of Zazzle's underlying motivations and goals for this project. Once we built an understanding of their goals for the project, we focused on what we needed to understand in order for the project to be a success for Zazzle. Because the vagueness and ambiguity of the problem Zazzle presented us with, we first focused on understand the reason behind why people personalize objects. We also wanted to understand what people valued about a service and experience. After building a broad understanding we then focused on understanding the current Zazzle experience.
Some of the primary research activities we conducted. From left to right : expert interview with Barry Schwartz, exploratory interviews, analogous domain exploration with Personal Shoppers, and a co-design activity at Zazzle.
We found most of the people we interviewed personalized gifts for others. Personalization is always triggered by an event; people never start personalizing during a browsing behavior. Despite all the anxiety throughout the process of personalizing, people personalize because of a greater need than actually personalizing the item. This need could be the need for validation of themselves or their relationships, therefore the personalized item is less important than the emotions it evokes and what it represents.
"I want to communicate the fact that I put a lot of time and
feeling if only just to decide
what the choices were."
feeling if only just to decide
what the choices were."
- Daniel, age 28
(Left) We used an Affinity Diagram to synthesize the first portion of our research and (Right) Six Hat Thinking to synthesize the second half of our primary research.
Design
After presenting our findings and opportunity areas to our client Zazzle, we visioned futures for Zazzle and how the personalized experience could manifest. The following themes emerged.
In 10 years Zazzle will:
• be your Personal Assistant
• be your Public Relations Agent
• help you form new relationships
• help you express yourself
• help you strengthen existing relationships
(Left) Visioning with our client after our Spring presentation. (Right) We took those ideas and bucketed them into themes.
We took the visions and storyboarded the ideas to see which avenues we should explore in more depth. We focused our project by deciding to design for friends and family who are separated by distance and have a need for closeness. Because relationships was a strong theme that arose in our research, we thought of ways we could strengthen existing relationship and to create those moments that would lead to a person personalizing an item. We quickly tested various concepts and assumptions through hallway interviews, user enactments and other methods as shown below.
During our Easter Egg concept test, people began to really think about their relationships. One participant said:
“I didn't realize how good friends we are.”
-Jerome
Seeing promising results we created user flows and iterated through paper prototypes until we got to Mid-FI. We needed to scope back, when we found people were becoming too focused on the interactions. Our Client's main priority was a proof of concept and implementation time line. So we refocused our testing with a paper prototype to see what were the most necessary components for our service to work. Then we created a plan for the adoption of our service.
Some of the iterations we went through before we ended up at our final concept.
During our testing, people were able to reconnect to old memories and remember forgotten details. They were laughing during the testing and talking about how they wanted to reconnect with their loved ones in talking about those shared memories.
“I’d say it’s improved our relationship; as it reminded us of how long we’ve known each other and how far we’ve come.”
-Kate
“This feels very personalized!”
- Devansh
We were able to show our clients how the users were connecting to the concept, becoming engrossed in their memories. We were also able to suggest an implementation timeline which was supported by our findings so they would have a starting point when further developing our service.
Moving Forward
There needs to be further exploration on the best medium to support our service. Although, we were able learn what was most necessary to support the basic needs people have, we weren't able to explore the optimum mediums in more depth. Additionally, although we had created a suggested user flow based on our findings from the concept test, there needs to be a deeper exploration into user flow and the actual usability of the service.
What I Learned
When usability testing, people become very interested in the functionalities. They test every option they see out of pure curiosity, becoming less focused on the task and its purpose. Throughout the process of research and design, not only do we need to be aware of the underlying user needs, but also client needs. In order to understand how to make the project successful, we needed to understand why the client wanted to do this project. I also learned about the Paradox of Choice, and how lots of options is great when you know exactly what you want but not otherwise. Therefore, you need to use progressive disclosure to help in the decision process.
