Cherish is a concept for a mobile application that helps you avoid unwanted gifts. With Cherish, you'll make interactive wishlists to share with friends and family, giving them insight to what's been bought and what's still missing. Cherish makes it easy to add items to the wishlist with pricing and locations.
- Ease the gift hunt with Cherish!
"Design a solution (application, website) that resolves a specific need you have yourselves."
Our problem statement: How can we aid in reducing unwanted gifts or the same gift twice, and still maintain the joy of not knowing what's underneath the wrappings?
Due to project constraints, the research process was shortened. We did market research to have a base idea to build on, getting an idea of what we liked and what features we would like to change and include in our own concept.
Based on our findings from the market research, we made an estimate on how broad the target audience was excepted to be.
Primary: people in all ages who'll celebrate an occasion or an event where you'll typically get gifts, i.e. birthdays, weddings, christmas eve, etc.
Secondary: people who'll use the solution without sharing it. While outside of the intended usage, it could be used as a personal shopping list.
Based on our market research and intended audiences, we mapped out a user journey.
Based on what we mapped out for the concept sketch, I drew a sitemap to illustrate the information architecture of the application.
Based on the concept sketch, we created wireframes to see the surfaces in context.
I would normally involve users at this point by testing the wireframes. Long Iterations of a product without user input can have an adverse effect on the development. Since time is a constraint for this project, we relied on the feedback from our supervisor. Users are first involved during the development of high fidelity prototypes.
Our main goal with the user testing was mapping the general understanding of the concept, interest level, errors and missed features and the navigation of the product. The market has a number of wishlist applications; does Cherish offer something new and delightful?
Retrospectively thinking, I wonder if an pre-emptive survey could help mapping the interest level and further condense our target audiences.
The user testing was conducted with 5 participants remotely over Zoom.
Main findings
The test participants were generally satisfied with the concept and the navigation. Some specific feedback and findings:
Iterating from feedback
Dashboard, inbox and product pages are three main features who got redesigned based on feedback from usability testing. To help with navigation, we implemented breadcrumbs and highlighted the current tab in the menu. General UI feedback were also accounted for, such as spacing and text size.
It would be helpful in future iterations to user test specific features to mend the products weakest points. More in depth research would also help to give a better foundation for the development of an actual application.
Developing a product under constraints is certainly difficult, but it certainly helped us evolve our decision making skills. How can we solve the problems despite our constraints? The importance of usability testing is also yet again highlighted; not everything we thought would be user friendly ended up being as self-explanatory as we imagined.
- Still, that's a problem for the backlog, and a future iteration. Thanks for reading!