Giftbomb Extended Features

The Client

Giftbomb launched in March 2018 as a platform for giving and receiving mobile gift cards. The founder’s vision was to relieve merchants of the busy work of providing and processing gift cards, while encouraging patrons to give and receive with a personal touch.

As a startup, Giftbomb must spend development resources wisely. However, the founders have taken a front-loaded approach to growing Giftbomb’s reach: while Giftbomb is still small, they prioritize a high-quality user experience.

Users and Audience

As Giftbomb grows, the majority of Giftbomb users will be individuals looking for a personal way to gift friends and family. Other users include managers or team leaders looking for a unique way to gift employees. Lastly, Giftbomb is also used by realtors or other sales and service providers to gift clients.

Merchants are carefully curated by Giftbomb: At present, Giftbomb only adds local businesses with a Google Reviews rating of 4.2 or more.

Team and Role

Our team of three designers completed a competitive audit of select gifting and giftcard platforms. We then proposed features to add to Giftbomb’s existing functionality. As part of a larger team of designers, we held an initial features discussion with Giftbomb founders and developers to scope proposed features and understand technological constraints. Our small team then analyzed the results of a Kano survey to identify features associated with performance and delight.

I created a user journey map and looked for opportunities to improve the existing user experience. Following development scoping, I selected a set of features to meet those opportunities, while considering Giftbomb’s development budget and business goals. I created high-fidelity wireframes for presentation to the client, and built an interactive prototype of one feature flow.

The Process

Competitive Audit

The team analyzed Giftbomb against seven competitors in the gifting space, looking for features in common as well as ways in which the applications varied. We found opportunities for Giftbomb in the areas of selecting recipients from among social media connections, regifting or passing on funds/goods stored in the app, and splitting payments.

User Journey Map: Current

In the existing user journey, I saw three key opportunity areas to serve business goals, while improving the user experience:

• Incorporate a greater sense of human emotion during Discover phase

• Convey the value of local merchants during the Purchase phase

• Increase user engagement during the Champion (referral) phase

Rapid Prototyping and Initial Features Discussion

The larger design team, including our team of three, together prototyped approximately 100 feature scenarios. Affinity diagramming was conducted and feature scenarios were grouped according to topic/focus area and tentative development considerations.

Above: A selection of prototyped feature scenarios.

Below: Affinity diagramming. Grouping features according to focus area and presumed development considerations.

The grouped features were then presented to Giftbomb founders and developers in a sprint to scope each feature in terms of business priority level (High 1 to Low 4) and development expense. Development expense was defined as follows:

• Small - UI changes only (1-2 weeks)

• Medium - Existing API and UI changes (2-4 weeks)

• Large - New API required, or Data Structure + UI Changes (6 weeks)

Kano Survey and Analysis

Feature Selection and Changed User Journey

My final proposed feature set served opportunity areas I identified in the original User Journey, and balanced user perceptions with business goals and development constraints.

Annotated Wireframes

The following are annotated wireframes of my proposed release features as shared with the client.

Conclusion

Alternative Implementations

As an alternative or augmentation to the Personalized Text feature, I suggested that developers might consider an implementation in which the text comes from the Giftbomb sender’s own phone number. However, this does include an important user experience caveat: The Giftbomb sender may wish to keep his/her personal phone number private.

Future Release Considerations

One early prototyped scenario was a feature in which a Giftbomb recipient could share a photo or message showing how they used their Giftbomb. This feature was found in Kano analysis to correlate with Delight. Though it was scoped as a heavy development expense and indicated as a low business priority, user reactions indicate that it may be worth prioritizing higher.

Additionally, this feature strongly supports all three Business goals of Increasing User Engagement, Conveying the Value of Merchants, and Including a Sense of Human Emotion.