The Language of Love

Across the USA and all over the world, flowers, candy and gifts are exchanged on February 14th. With Valentines Day just around the corner, our team began seeking insights into how people purchase gifts and the process people go through when trying to find a gift.

We went into our problem space with the assumptions that gift giving is a stressful process. Although people enjoy giving and receiving from loved ones, gifts can often result in duplicate or unwanted items. This is usually the result of not knowing what loved ones want or need.

Knowing that the ways in which we give and receive love can vary from person to person also added layers to the problem space. While items may be the first thing that comes to mind, quality time, acts of service and words of affirmation are all considered to be presents. For our initial problem statement, we sought to expand the definition of what a gift is.

Our hypothesis was that it is time consuming and mentally draining to come up with appropriate and thoughtful gifts. Keeping in mind that many people choose minimal lifestyles, tangible and mass produced items are often not preferred. Consequently, people would rather give and/or receive experiences, services, and locally sourced gifts. We began with the following assumptions below:

• People have a hard time finding unique gifts for their loved ones.
• People often give and receive unwanted/unused items that lead to unnecessary waste.
• People are conscious and prefer to shop local and ethically sourced gifts.
• People enjoy giving and receiving handmade and sustainable goods.
• Convenience, speed, and price drives people to shop at larger discount stores.
• Gifts go beyond material items: experiences, services, donations

These assumptions to the initial problem statement: How might we… facilitate meaningful connections by expanding the definition of gifts beyond product based items?

Research

We started by interviewing participants that would help us understand the user’s experience with gift giving and receiving, along with their biggest pain points that come with this process. There was a range of ages, varying amounts of disposable income and attitudes about gifting. Although there was a wide range of stories, the one thing that stood out was that a gift is something given with thought behind it.

Affinity Mapping

Affinity Mapping is a vital tool when trying to capture a thorough picture of what are the main pain points, preferences, and habits of the average user. Once all the interviews are done, each one was condensed into the main comments and sentiments to then compare with other responses. This helped us identify common trends and behaviors that dictated what features and tools we would develop.

Though Affinity Mapping, we were able to break down common trends and opinions within the following categories and make the following “I” statements below.

Persona

Our persona is a personification of our target user, taken from the insights gathered during user interviews. It includes goals, needs, pain points, demographic information, habits, and behaviors of the general audience for our tool, and it will be referenced and considered in every stage of our project. The persona is the target user of our product. This was carefully selected and crafted with the help of the insights we collected through our user research. Victoria, our persona below, was used as a point of reference throughout the next steps in the development of our product.

Through our persona we came to the insights below:

• Victoria tends to want to give locally sourced gifts but prefers the convenience of a larger brand.>>Users are concerned about sustainability and supporting local businesses/artisans but often resort to shopping at larger brands because of affordability and convenience.
• Victoria cares more about the meaning of gifts rather than the cost.>>People perceive a gift as something that was thought out.
• Victoria places more value on spending quality time with her loved ones compared to getting tangible items.>>People prefer gifting experiences more than material items and often want it to be a shared memory.
• Victoria feels awkward asking or expressing their needs and wants directly.>>Gift recipients feel awkward and think it takes away meaning when directly expressing that they want a specific gift.

User Journey

The User Journey maps out the persona’s journey through a task that deals with the problem space. Our persona, Victoria set out to find a gift for her friend Maya who had just moved to New York City. By depicting Victoria’s search for a gift we were able to identify opportunities to design into. Likewise after the exercise, our team came away reinforced about our user’s reality and pain points. A framework for the challenges we hoped to take on began to form.

Through our user journey we came to the insights below:

• Because she had not seen her friend, Maya, in a long time, Victoria was initially confused and doubted whether her gift choices were appropriate for Maya during her search.>>Gift givers lack real time information about preferences and hobbies when searching for gifts.
• Victoria grew frustrated and spent a lot of time in the brainstorming and searching phases troubleshooting gift ideas for Maya.>>Gift givers often go through many rounds of mentally draining emotional highs and lows when researching and selecting a gift of meaning for someone.
• Victoria found a solution to her task by gifting her friend Maya with not only a book but gifting tickets to a book signing that she could go to with her.>>Users enjoy gifting experiences that they can also participate in.

After initial research and gathering the main take aways, initial assumptions have been confirmed by our users. Gift giving AND receiving is a stressful task. This lead us to a revised problem statement: How might we create a space where gift-givers, like Victoria, and their personal network can communicate information to curate gifts beyond just products?

Market Exploration

We then conducted a competitive analysis to find the place of our product versus competitors, either those that are heavily leaned towards product outcome and those that offer services/experiences. We compared them based on how general or specific they were. Our competitive matrix includes 5 competitors and their respective grayscale logos next to our GIVVY logo below.

Our competitive matrix led us to the insights below:

• We positioned Givvy at the center line between products and service/experience based gifts. We wanted users to be able to curate gifts that included one or a combination of these gift types.
• With its focus on services and gift giving options, Groupon was on the service side of the spectrum. Elfster, WishList, Elfshare were heavily product focused.
• Nift fell on the general open ended gifting section with its focus on gift cards.
• We envision Givvy being specific rather than general in its offerings with a focus on local, handmade and sustainable goods and services/experiences.

After seeing where our product, Givvy, fell within the market spectrum, we looked to see what other businesses in the same sphere are offering to their users. Our team employed a Competitive Feature Analysis to chart out what features these similar businesses (used also in the Competitive Matrix before) have in relation to the product we hoped to design.

A Comparative feature analysis mapped out businesses that use the same business model as Givvy but are different in scope.

Brand Partners

With the goal of trying to understand our potential brand partners we then employed the usage of a Business Model Canvas. Through this methodology, we are able to get a complete overview of the main components that influence Etsy’s and Airbnb’s success, roadblocks, and potential friction points along with what they offer the public and differentiates them from the competition. By exploring key facets, our team learned how both Etsy and AirBnb were potentially aligned with our business goals, and how we could compliment each other by “sharing” or trading either user base, product/experience catalog, market reach, etc.

Etsy Brand Background

• Etsy is a website selling mostly handmade items and run mostly by local businesses and individual artisans
• It has an option that gives recommendations based on users’ past interests as well as suggestions based on similar items the user is currently viewing
• Etsy has a specific feature showing minority run businesses or suggestions in terms of specific time of the year/event. (e.g. Black History Month)
• Etsy allows the opportunity to connect users with artists via direct chat making special connections between customers and sellers of the item
• Many items on Etsy can be custom made including size/color/personalized name of recipient/event type
• Some individual vendors on Etsy offer gift cards and wrapping.

Insights

Etsy is a marketplace for small business owners and artisans to sell their goods. The handmade nature of most of their offerings appeals to many. Our site would allow users to support small businesses, both with tangible products and intangible services and experiences.

Etsy offers a wide variety of homemade goods. People tend to prefer these items over mass-produced goods in light of renewed consciousness about sustainability and supporting local businesses.

AirBnb Brand Background

• AirBnb is a platform that allows access to unique homes and experiences around the globe.
• It has an extensive database of experiences based on geographic location and type.
• AirBnb allows users to book experiences based on filters of number of people, price, time of day and language.

Insights

AirBnb has the unique advantage of offering people with experiences unlike other product based companies. Its extensive database is already tailored to location and type. Adding these options will expand the scope of gift giving on Givvy.

Design

To start designing our product we ran a design studio amongst our team. The ideation began with our persona, Victoria, her user journey and the insights we gained from our research as the catalyst. Our team knew we wanted to create a website as we had learned the practice of gift giving is a pre-planned, thoughtful act.

Product Principles

After working on the design studio and getting an idea of how we want to organize and segment our main features, our last step before building the first iteration of the website was to clearly establish what product/design principles we wanted to uphold.

The following is how we focused our design motivations:

• Pair individualized local products with unique local experiences
• Expand the customer base for our local community businesses and artisans
• Expand people’s consciousness when it comes to consumer purchasing
• Provide meaningful connections and memories
• Reduce frustration and bring joy and excitement during the gift buying process

Development

We used the design tool Figma to create wireframes and prototype them into a clickable, bare bones version of the Givvy website. The clickable elements were made based on a set of tasks we determined our persona Victoria would follow in order to purchase a gift for her friend.

We running through two rounds of usability tests and now recommend the following next steps:

• Running further usability testing on the high-fidelity prototype to make sure it’s ready for launch.
• Once launched, a collection of the aforementioned analytics metrics will provide the information we need to go into the next iteration of the site.
• We need to Incorporate shipping company API’s so users of the site can more easily track their orders
• We suggest to consider database integration of our recommended local stores for users.
• As more people engage with the platform, the functionality of the site will be refined in order to give more tailored content to users

When we finally launch Givvy, there will be certain metrics we’ll need to measure to test how effective and useful the site is for users. The analytics method we will employ is the Google HEART Framework, testing several factors about the site.

• Happiness: Number of times a user purchases a gift WITH or WITHOUT a special occasion
• Engagement: New registrants, how many are referrals from current users and how many are from direct/organic searches
• Adoptions: How many new accounts have been created
• Retention: Low number of abandoned and/or inactive accounts
• Partner Focus: how many clicks and purchases are coming from our website

Most of the analytics we want to test involve user retention and frequency of gift purchases. Our potential brand partners will want to know the level of engagement — the higher it is, the more refined our data will be for recommending products to users.

If our task success and happiness metrics are high, we will be able to attract brand partners such as AirBnb and Etsy to our website. A customer base with a high number of profiles created over a month and users spontaneously buying gifts is hard to forgo. High engagement with local vendors will be a selling point of particular interest to these hopeful partners.

No easy feat, but it’s necessary to help reduce waste, support local businesses, and make sure people can express their love in a meaningful way.