Presently
Launched an app for users to receive birthday reminders and curated gift recommendations for their loved ones
Overview
The Presently digital mobile app allows users to record their loved ones’ birthdays by creating profiles that recommend personalized gift suggestions. Presently sends reminders to ensure a birthday does not get missed
Team members: 4 UX Designers and 6 SEI (Software) Developers
My role as a UX Designer (Generalist) was to collaborate with other fellow UX designers and software developers, visually design call-to-action features for the onboarding process to create a user profile, and design a style guide that complements Presently interface
Presently won 1st Prize by a panel of judges from General Assembly’s regional hackathon 🥇
Timeframe: 1 week design challenge
What was the ideation process to start Presently?
My team and I responded to the prompt for a 1 week Design Sprint called, “Automate your Life” The prompt was broad and our developers and designers had questions to determine what the phrase meant.
We thought of some questions and read articles that our supervisors posted and started to narrow down our ideas by sharing the experiences we had with various digital products and services we use, such as reminder apps and organizational tools.
Everyone recorded their thoughts on sticky notes on a collaborative whiteboard tool called, Figjam to list out what would be useful for people to use in their daily lives.
Problem Statement:
Our team collectively agreed that remembering birthdays and the act of gift-giving was a challenging task because our loved ones had different interests and belonged to various age groups.
What was our Solution?
We came with different ways to help remedy the problem of forgetting birthdays and feeling overwhelmed with choosing a gift which were:
📝 set up reminders for users to wish their loved ones a happy birthday
🎁 personalize gifts
What was the visual design research process?
My teammates and I were researching how birthday reminder apps and gift suggestion features were designed by conducting a competitive/comparative analysis of 5 digital apps (Giftata, hip.app, GiftGuru, Happy Birthday App, and Gift Planner)
Our developers created code to see what the layout structure was like and although we had a myriad of ideas to implement, such as sharing social media contact information, we had to focus on building a minimum viable product, which was to set up reminders and create generated gift tags
I noticed that a lot of the fonts used in other birthday apps were bolded and sans serif. However, i thought they looked too harsh and took up a lot of space, so I wanted to use something lighter.
Gift Guru used a typeface, Mulish, and I liked how it was softer and had a rounded look. It fit in with the birthday occasion and theme.
The hip. app used Avenir Next and the greetings also looked soft with the bolded font that was similar to Mulish
I looked on Fontshare to see if there were more choices for rounded sans serif typefaces with accommodating fonts and decided to choose Pilcrow Rounded
While my teammates were designing low-fidelity wireframes, I mainly curated a style guide consisting of bright colors and a typeface (Pilcrow Rounded)
My team and I made sure to choose a typeface that was legible to meet accessibility guidelines
While I was choosing colors, my teammate was creating clay animations, and noticed he used bright colors that brought out a vibrant mood to create a sense of excitement that came from birthdays. Some keywords that came to mind were approachable, intentional, inspiring, organized, and fun
We created a mood board to see if there were colors that we liked and also chose images from artwork and birthday images from Google
Mobile and Desktop Prototyping
While our primary focus was to create a mobile platform, our developers and our design team wondered if it was helpful to create a desktop platform.
I agreed that it was beneficial because it allowed us to build a responsive product that catered to multiple audiences that were looking for a gift on their phone or their desktop
To create a responsive layout, we made our desktop very similar to our mobile view to provide consistency
In order to avoid bias, we conducted moderated usability tests from 5 users to gain feedback for Presently
We asked our five users to complete these 3 tasks:
Create an Account
Add a new friend profile
Generate gift ideas
Results:
Task One: Create an Account
All 5/5 users were able to successfully (direct) complete the task and stated that the task was easy 🌟
Task Two: Add a new friend profile
3/5 users were directly able to complete the task
2/5 users completed the task with errors because they wanted to explore gifts before setting tags and one expected to fill out friends’ information before adding gift tags
Task Three: Generate Gift recommendations based on tags
3/5 users completed the task with errors because users expected to see gifts on the navigation bar or their profile.
Based on our user feedback we implemented changes to provide consistency, visibility of system status, and scale hierarchy
Reflection
After presenting our product to a panel of judges Presently won first prize in our regional week-long hackathon
We got together with the development team, we continued to organize structured meetings to launch Presently to the iOS App Store
Before launching Presently, we added screenshot pages to describe the features, such as reminders and personalized recommendations
I learned how to organize structure for tasks in this short period of time by using Agile process methodology and staying focused by implementing features, sticking to a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)