Connecting families through gift-giving
Designing a holiday wish list app for a three day Hackathon
Case Study: UX/UI
Nov 2021
Overview
The Project
For three days, I participated in a Hackathon that revolved around “Areas Technology can address accessibility needs for Elders during the holiday season”
Keeping that in mind, we created a wish list app.
Favorite items when browsing the product catalog
Purchasing the product which brings the user to an affiliate link
Share or print options for their wishlist
Detail information page on a single item
Competitors
Amazon
Organizes mass amounts of information
Their “ADD TO LIST” function is easy to use
They give many details about a product including dimensions, similar items, and ratings giving users more information on an item
Giftful
Allows users to add items from browsing within the app from major retailers
Users can have multiple lists such as birthday, Christmas, wedding, or baby shower
The interface is simple and easy to use
Users can paste links or manually input a certain product
Elfster
The beginning prompt asks the user to “Start Wishing” or “Create an Exchange” making it simple for people during the holidays
Has a very friendly and easy-to-use interface
They have birthday reminders pulled from your contacts
Provides a date scroll for when the event is happening or the deadline for signing up to the wishlist
What’s the problem?
Holiday wishlists need to be more readily accessible to kids and elderly shoppers
Persona: Mary
Persona: Jenna
Persona
Based on our persona’s and their needs, we created some assumptions for our solution.
With Mary and Jenna in mind…
How might we provide the elderly and kids a similar shopping experience when putting together a wishlist?
How might we make gift-giving more efficient during the holidays?
Design Studio
My Invision Sketch
The other designer and I did some quick sketches for the homepage, a possible checkout, and other sections a wishlist may need. For our next iterations, we simplified the design due to time and functionality.
Grayscale
We started with a mid-fidelity wireframe where each frame focused on one task at a time. Keeping the homepage very simple was best for making the app feel intuitive.
The frame for the product page was the most challenging because we wanted to provide shoppers with the essential information needed and not overwhelm them with too much information.
Style Guide
We wanted to give the app a simple holiday feel without feeling over-decorated like how a Christmas tree can be. We chose these colors so the shopper would focus on the items that need their attention when browsing products.
Next Steps
The hackathon was a challenging experience, being able to work with another designer and collaborate with multiple developers.
What I learned mostly through this hackathon event was the ability to back up my design decisions. There were multiple times when the developers would communicate certain limitations or something that they can’t do with my mockups and designs. It was a hard balance, I would stay flexible and listen to their feedback to redesign something they had in mind.
I had so many ideas for the app but due to the time constraint on this event, time management was key to delivering an app with the most essential pieces. I wanted to create an account profile, display the rating, labels for recipients, birthday reminders, and more features broadening this app even more than just a wishlist app.