Macy's GiftTogether: Collaborative Gift Giving
Gift giving is not about me, it’s about you.
It’s about telling you we appreciate you. But finding that perfect something that sparks joy while staying within our budgets is not always the easiest, and Macy’s wants to help. Because every gift is exciting and personal, and so should the process be.
PROJECT TEAM
Product Designers | UX Researchers | UX Manager
PROJECT DURATION
Two Months
MY ROLE
Product Designer
User Research, Participatory Workshops, Product Design, User Testing
IMPACT
• Identified opportunities to recruit new customers
• Uncovered customers’ personalization preferences and behaviours for Macy’s overall personalization efforts
Goals & Opportunities
As holiday season approaches, Macy’s Site Monetization team wants to explore ways to make holiday shopping easy for customers and acquire more users.
One of the opportunities lies in our gift guide.
Product Proposal
GiftTogether, a collaborative web-based experience that generate personalized gift guide for your gift recipient. Participants using this service will only see gift options tailor-made for your gift recipient based on occasion, recipient’s interest, and budgets instead of feeling overwhelmed by unrelated suggestions.
THE CHALLENGEHow can we establish Macy's Gift Guide as a one-stop shop for gift shoppers?
Discovery
Research from the marketing team has shown that Macy’s gift guide receives general appraisal for its categorizations and affordable price points. However, gift guide recommendations are still considered too generic.
We conducted comparative analysis on our competitors, and sent out 128 surveys to Macy’s users to learn more about their experiences using gift guides.
“I use gift guides for people that I really care about... I feel like it's going to the extra step to find that special something that will really make them happy.“
Opportunities
01 Personalization
People want to find something special for their loved ones, but it can be overwhelming to try to sort through a seemingly endless options.
02 Collaboration
People often get together to brainstorm what to get – whether it’s everyone chip in to get a nicer gift or basic coordination.
Participatory Design
We wanted to understand what is the most intuitive gift-giving process, so we ran 4 workshops with a total of 12 participants to perform 2 tasks to gather more information.
We first gave each group of participants a scenario that involves giving gift(s) to their coworkers/friends to warm them up, then asked them to do a card sorting activity individually first then discuss as a group.
We then put together a flow of collaborative gift giving process after observing how they reach consensus as a group after explaining their individual processes.
“Stages“ of group gift giving process from our workshops
Moved things around to create a more concise process
From these workshops, we came up with concrete stages to create an initial prototype
01 Invite: participants
02 Personalization to recipient: quiz
03 Poll: suggest gift options and vote
04 Budget/payment method
05 Purchase: based on voted payment method
Product Workflow
Based on the flowcharts and sketches, we put together our first iteration of user flow.
As we’re putting together the first iteration of user flow, we realized the decision and purchase phases are problematic in the current flow.
We decided that participants can only vote on gifts. Since everyone participating will most likely discuss which items to get and how everyone wants to split the total cost either offline or on another platform, only admin has the power to select a payment method that the group has discussed and charge people accordingly.
User Testings & Iteration
Based on these feedback, here are some actionable iteration:
01 Admin Setup
Remove the question about recipient’s name and gifting occasion from personalization quiz that everyone takes and include it as a part of the initial setup.
For poll deadlines, just have admin enters the date that they wish the recipient will receive the gift, and have the system automatically calculate the poll deadline and purchase date. If the admin wants to change those dates, there’ll be an option to customize.
02 Curated Gift Guide
In the future, if the gift recipient also has a Macy’s account and willing to publicize their size information for gift guide (in their setting), we can incorporate that into our curated list.
Potential to introduce public wish list feature to be incorporated in the curated gift guide.
03 Poll
Limits the number of votes – set up initially by admin, show the payment options more prominently, change “Learn More“ text to an icon with tooltip to stay consistent with what users are familiar with.
Final Design
01 Admin Setup
Initiate a collaborative gift guide board by setting up gift occasion, inviting participants, and determining gift giving date.
02 Personalization Quiz
Each participant is asked to answer a few questions about gift recipient and all answers will be collected to generate a personalized gift guide.
03 Curated Gift Guide
A curated gift guide based on everyone’s answers will present gift ideas specifically generated towards the recipient’s preference.
04 Nominate & Vote
Nominate gifts that you think the gift recipient will like for the group to vote on in the group’s dashboard.
05 Selection & Payment
After the voting date passes, admin can then select the group’s final gift decision and payment method (even split, pay as you wish, or single purchaser).