Background

When people ask what I want for my birthday or the holidays, I can never remember even though there are often things I am eyeing.

I began to think it would be nice to have a place where I can plan my purchases and show other people what I am looking at.

Problem

Billions of dollars are spent every year on unwanted holiday gifts and a decent percent of these gifts simply end up in the trash. People are becoming more conscientious about their waste and consumption, and want to do a better job with this.  

How can we help people make better purchases for themselves and others?

Proposed Solution

Two fold:

A streamlined process for saving items that people come across on the web.
A highly visual platform for revisiting and compiling these items into lists for sharing
Research
Methodology

Conducted qualitative interviews with 8 people, mixed genders, between the ages 25-27

Learning Objectives
How do people currently track items they want to purchase at a later time?
How do people decide what to get other people when they need to buy them a present?
Are people comfortable being explicit about what they would like as a gift? Why or why not?
Competitive Analysis

There are ways to track items today but these solutions are often fragmented, store specific, and/or hard to maintain.

Who are the main users?
People who enjoy online shopping and curating themed lists (people who like things like Amazon wishlist or Pinterest but want more functionality)
People who are often giving gifts, which from my research are primarily partners and family members
Putting Together the Solution
How will we aggregate products from across the web?

Current state
Saving items you like can largely only be done “in-platform” like on Pinterest or an Amazon wishlist.

Proposed new state
New aggregation platforms like My Mind and Notion has capabilities to scrape websites to save images through their browser extensions.

How is my solution different?
These current solutions are focused on how to save images. What if we could take it one step further and focus on saving products and displaying their prices?

Determining the right layout
I solicited feedback from fellow designers to understand which design people were most drawn to. While I initially started with some lower fidelity wireframes during idea generation, I had no sense of visual clutter until I added images.
Concerns around transparent image generation
I started building out additional screens for the 04 version since I thought the image generation would be easiest for developers and the layout was familiar from products like Pinterest.
I was generating the transparent images through Adobe Express and I took a look at their API documentation quickly to see if the same tool could be used for auto-generation of the transparent images. It's not clear if the transparency tool can be accessed, but I did find alternate tools like removal.ai that definitely had background removal tools that could be leveraged via their API.
But people surveyed unanimously picked version 01
Two points of feedback that influenced my decision to continue with the 01 version:
  • The product designers I spoke with found this card component design clean, simple, and actionable
  • Someone said their parents would have a much easier time navigating this site over the other. As a main user demographic, this was important consideration and how I ultimately decided to move forward with this layout
Iterations
User Testing

Participants & Goal

I conducted 5 user tests and focused on speaking with women who I know enjoy online shopping. My goal was to understand if the site felt enjoyable to use and filled a gap for shoppers.

Would my solution be something people would want to use? Why or why not? How do they want to use it?
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Takeaways

  • Half of users said saving by right clicking didn’t feel intuitive and they would prefer to click a chrome extension button
  • 40% of users felt uncomfortable with the idea of asking for things explicitly and wouldn’t use the registry function
  • All users said they want the ability to see what items their friends have saved
  • No issues navigating the UX

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Feature Requests

Everyone offered ideas for features or use cases they would want to use this for like:
  • Cross comparing different prices and styles of an item you need to purchase (for example to decide on a pair of boots)
  • Getting notified about price drops or if something is back in stock
  • Integration with rewards system like Rakuten
  • Introducing an “influencer” portal like Amazon Storefronts
  • Budgeting functionality to allocate spending limits per month (for example)
Final Adjustments (For Now)

Tightened Up Design

Once I started creating mock ups, I realized I had made the cards and headers too large and users would have to scroll to see even the first row of items they had saved. The point is to make products and prices as visually accessible as possible, so I condensed card sizes, increased cards per row, and shortened header information.

I also realized the pop-up text felt verbose and I tried to cut down language as much as possible so users could easily scan and absorb the necessary information.

Ensured responsive design

Spent time in Figma making sure constraints and auto layout were set and used appropriately to allow the website to properly scale for mobile and iPad, so people could view their lists and make purchases.

Because chrome extensions aren’t supported on iPads and mobile devices, the saving workflow from above wouldn’t be operable here. By having “Add Thing” as an option on the page people can still input links through this.

Final Thoughts

Project Summary

My Things is a solution offered to create a better shopping and gifting experience by creating a shareable visual way to track items that people want.

Success Metrics

For this design sprint, I was able to confirm the usability of the UX and elicit positive user sentiment:

  • 100% task success rate
  • 85% of users confirmed solution filled a gap and expressed how

In a real world setting, I would want to track user engagement and adoption through:

  • Time spent on site
  • Conversion on links to determine if purchases occur through the portal
  • Number of items added per month, shared lists, lists created


Next Steps

Build out features like a profile and price notifications, and continue to get continuous feedback from potential users to hone MVP.