Redefining gift giving
Helping people get what they want and give what makes sense
There are few questions that can be asked to absolutely anyone, regardless of who you’re asking, and one of those questions is:
“What’s the worst gift you’ve ever received?”
This question holds the same sentiment and thought process amongst anyone regardless of circumstance.
What was it? Who gave it to you? What were you thinking when you received it? — The answers to these questions are usually along the lines of frustration, confusion, and sympathy for the giver, but nonetheless, it’s still not fun to get something you don’t like/need from someone that was simply trying to be nice.
These circumstances are what motivated us to want to understand more about this problem and how we could help.
That’s all fun and great to want to help fix such a big pain point in people’s lives, but.. Where do we begin with such an ambitious task?
With the people of course! Those that have suffered through it first hand. So we embarked on user interviews to learn more.
What are people struggling with?
We interviewed 7 people individually, all ranging from different age groups, spending habits, preferences and approaches, because we wanted to cast a wide net and be able to narrow down what everyone has in common.
We asked them questions about how they plan for gifts, what’s the worst gift they’ve ever received, their biggest pain points when buying or receiving gifts, etc.
And we were able to find the below trends amongst all interviewees:
- Users have very specific preferences when it comes to giving/receiving gifts
- The amount of time, effort and money spent depends on who is receiving the gift
- Users have trouble finding the perfect meaningful gift in time
- Where and how an item is made is extremely important to our audience. Things that are local, handmade, and ethically sourced are preferred but it’s not as convenient as the big brand names.
- Users prefer to gifting memories, especially ones that they can join in on
- Finding a gift that is useful and of value to who is receiving it is a huge frustration
And the quote that stood out the most to us was:
“A gift is something with thought behind it”
That’s what really got our brains moving towards one direction.
With all this new found information, trends, and patterns, we set out to build our ideal persona. A fictitious character that would encompass the characteristics we needed to focus on as we moved through our research.
Who are we building for?
Meet Victoria. Since she’s environmentally conscious, when it comes to giving or receiving gifts, Victoria prefers more thoughtful, hand crafted items. However, since she doesn’t have a lot of free time, she sometimes finds herself going to larger brands just for the convenience.
She feels awkward asking directly for things that she wants and thinks gift cards are not personal. If it were up to her, she would rather spend quality time with her loved ones.
Using Victoria as our guiding star, we navigated through a common gift giving scenario to understand the emotional highs and lows the average person goes through, mainly to really understand where and how we could help.
The scenario was:
Victoria’s old classmate, Maya, is moving to New York City and she want to get her a welcome gift
As you can see below*, Victoria goes through quite the emotional roller coaster.
*The below image is to show, at a high level, the variety of up and downs in the journey, no need to focus on specifics.
This was a vital point in our research that helped us understand what to focus on and confirmed that our initial understanding of the problem was on the right track.
So our new approach was -
“How might we create a space where gift-givers, like Victoria, and their personal network can communicate information to curate gifts beyond just products?”
Who is currently competing in the space and who can help?
After consolidating the problem and our audience, we needed to understand who (if anyone) is already working on a solution and how we could differentiate ourselves.
We conducted a Competitive and Comparative Analysis of the space, which quickly made us realize that there were no holistic solutions out there that could tackle what we were prioritizing, such as:
- Up to date individual profiles to showcase their latest preferences. To avoid having to explicitly ask or share what someone needs or wants.
- Local options that can compare to someone’s current big brand preferences.
- Gift options beyond physical items, such as experiences, services, or even quality time.
When looking at the “local” aspect of our offering, we thought, “Who could we partner with that has a robust catalog of local offerings that would benefit from broader exposure?”
Since we’re thinking of offering both local items and experiences, we wanted to partner with two different organizations:
- Etsy
- Airbnb
What are we building and how?
Once we pinned down what’s out there and what’s missing, we moved forward with prioritizing features, designing the first few sketches of the product, and testing these iterations to develop further.
After running a couple rounds of development and testing, we got to our high fidelity prototype.
Introducing GIVVY — Redefining gift giving. Helping people get what they want and give what makes sense.
How will we know if people like our product?
With our research complete, features established, and prototype built. Now we need to understand what our KPIs will be and how we will track success once our product is live.
The following are the metrics we will be focusing on:
- Engagement — New registrants, how many are referrals from current users and how many are from direct/organic searches
- Happiness — Number of times a user purchases a gift WITH or WITHOUT a special occasion.
- Retention — Low number of abandoned and/or inactive accounts
- Adoptions — How many new accounts have been created
- Partner Focus — how many clicks and purchases are coming from our website
This will dictate what changes we need to make, where people are getting stuck, and what are our most popular features.
So… What’s next?
To move things along and make Givvy a reality, we 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 considering 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
We know this is no easy feat, but it’s necessary to help reduce waste, support local business, and make sure people get what they want without having to ask for it.
No more receiving inconvenient kitchen appliances, or your 20th candle of the year. Let’s give and receive what is needed!
