The Problem

With background research on customer center complaints and customer reviews, many reasons were related to lack of information regarding who the sender was, and receiving completely different design from what was ordered (or what they think they ordered), due to technical limitation and product availability.

Design Process

The product manager and I decided to conducted a quick one hour user testing exercise with 9 internal employees, to learn more about the user problem. With the common reasons for low star rating and insights from the exercise, I proposed to perform a generative user research to dig deeper into pain points and understand our target users. I worked with a research agency from defining research questions, moderating, and recording raw data of responses. Research result was presented with UX recommendations to the entire organization, including leadership. After receiving leadership buy-in, I started the ideation of potential experience and flows. Mockups were created and iterated based on team feedback. Finally, I worked with the same research agency to validate the proposed design using an interactive on-device prototype.

Gift Cards
Found data around low star rating reviews, conducted in-depth interviews with internal and external participants, and produced research report and high-level recommendations.

Found data around low star rating reviews, conducted in-depth interviews with internal and external participants, and produced research report and high-level recommendations.

Design explorations through sketching and low-fidelity wireframes, and created flow and information architecture based around user feedback.

Design explorations through sketching and low-fidelity wireframes, and created flow and information architecture based around user feedback.

Produced mockups, improving fidelity throughout the process.

Produced mockups, improving fidelity throughout the process.

Created interactive on-device prototype using prototype, which was used in leadership reviews and usability testing.

Created interactive on-device prototype using prototype, which was used in leadership reviews and usability testing.

Performed usability tasks and in-depth interview with external participants, comparing existing and newly proposed UX.

Performed usability tasks and in-depth interview with external participants, comparing existing and newly proposed UX.

Research Findings

Additional user problems and needs were defined through generative research.

  1. Users always have the person and occasion in mind when picking a Greeting Card (or a Gift Card).

  2. Almost all participants wanted to take the advantage of free shipping and send it directly to the recipient. However, the process of adding the recipient’s address was difficult or completely missed before completing the checkout.

  3. Users automatically assumed that recipient will know who the sender was. However, they needed to go through a hidden step during checkout process, which most users could not discover.

  4. Different product options are not discoverable for physical gift cards, but when they found the product they were very satisfied with the various options.

  5. Design selecting process was a painful and time consuming experience, requiring too many steps.

  6. The term Denomination (Gift card amount) was not very intuitive and some participants skipped the selection step completely.

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Solution

“Users have different mental model when purchasing gifts for others”

The main goal while designing was to not educate users to change their natural gift purchasing behavior, but help complete their intended tasks in a simple and delightful way. This would in turn build trust and reduce frustration throughout the end-to-end experience of purchasing a physical gift card online. In the detail page, product selection was now available based around occasion, then design, then finally the gift card amount. Amount selector became more intuitive. Most importantly, users have the ability to add the recipient’s address and gift message on the detail page. This solution was especially important for gifting behaviors because they have a completely different mental model compared to shopping for themselves on Amazon. Lastly, to help with discoverability, all the different gift card types were shown at the top of the detail page.

The Results

During usability testing of the new design, all participants were able to successfully and quickly complete the online Gift Card purchasing tasks without any confusion. All participants preferred the new design compared to the current. Research data was widely used with the Gift Card organization for product planning, and many stakeholders said it was very insightful, not just UX, but on customer expectations on products, etc.

Current status:
Occasion selector and the improved “Gift card amount” selecting experience was launched in March, 2019. Other feature improvements informed by this project are planned for future development.

Patents:
User interfaces for item filtering