Life in the Present
An authentic, immersive, and delightful gifting experience through the use of VR and a mobile app concept.
Picking out personalized gifts for family and loved ones can be a challenge. Could there be a way to make the process fun, interactive and thoughtful? Our team aimed to find out.
My Role: UX/UI design, UX Research, VR and Mobile.
Mobile: Splash screen | Card carousels | Mood board
VR: Contacts/ "Scroll-o-dex"™
Duration: 3 Weeks | April 2022
Team: Dilfira Aparjan, Sarah Comella, April Palm, Knathan Ryan, Zak Schwartz & Emma CotéEwers
Tools Used: Figma, Invision, Miro, Trello, Google Forms
OVERVIEW
THE CHALLENGE
People struggle to pick out gifts that are creative, personal, and fit the recipient’s personal style
THE SOLUTION
A VR and mobile app that provides an authentic, immersive, and delightful gifting experience
THE IMPACT
Users get to know each other authentically and have fun picking out personal, thoughtful gifts
How might we breathe new life into the gift-giving process by utilizing VR to provide an authentic, immersive, and delightful gifting experience?
DESIGN PROCESS
RESEARCH
We conducted 12 one-on-one interviews and an 85 person survey to understand how people give gifts, why they give gifts and if they experience pain points in the gift-giving process.
KEY TAKEAWAY INSIGHTS:
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I love getting someone a gift I picked out just for them
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VR could be cool, but I really don’t have much experience with it
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I enjoy the creativity and expression of house/world building games
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I don’t understand what a virtual gift is… I’m not sure if I would like that
Nearly half of our survey results revealed that people find it difficult or moderately difficult to choose a gift for someone.
USER PERSONA
From our research we developed our User Persona. We found that people need an intuitive tool to connect creatively with their friends and family and gain a better understanding of loved one’s authentic tastes.
This provides more meaningful, useful, and positive gift-exchanging experiences.
BRAINSTORMING & IDEATION
Our team was on a roll now and we began our next process by implementing and Affinity Diagram. This allowed us to really hone in on how, why and what our user is feeling as they enter the gift giving process.
PRIORITY MATRIX, STORY BOARD & VALUE PROPOSITION
After our affinity diagram we had a clear picture of the particular pain points and desires our user has- we used these insights to create a Feature Priority Matrix and develop a story board for our user. We utilized I like, I wish, what if methods to flush out our Feature Priorities.
We utilized I like, I wish, what if methods to flush out our Feature Priorities.
Our storyboard provides a scenario in which our persona has a problem, finds a potential tool and discovers a way to relieve pain points and solve challenges.
VALUE PROP: Life in the Present is a multimodal experience that allows users to solve the overwhelming and frustrating process of giving practical gifts that are meaningful to family, friends and loved ones.
We are better, because users can leverage AI and user-input data (via custom virtual homebuilding) to plan intentional gifts providing an authentic understanding of their giftees.We retain our customers, because of the depth they can obtain in the giving experience.
USER FLOW
After designing feature priorities, storyboarding and developing our Value Proposition for our user, we now focused our attention on developing a user flow to utilize our mobile and VR app.
Here are our three main flows we wanted our user to be able to complete:
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Onboarding including style board, home basics, and adding friends
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Explore a friend’s home and purchase a gift
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Design their own home and create a wish list
WIREFRAMING
LO-FI and MIDFI WIREFRAMES
Our team now had a good amount of data, insight and research to begin sketching up what we were dreaming. We were running short on time now with only a week left to begin our wireframing and prototyping of our design. In order to save time, we split our team in half to work on multi-modal platforms; half of us on VR and half on mobile. We began to sketch out and flush out our ideas on paper and digitally.
Mobile and VR wireframes:
Usability Testing for Mid-Fi Prototype
After a quick round of mock-ups by our team we wired together some prototypes to begin testing for iterations. We tested six different users to give us feedback on our designs.
Key takeaways:
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Thought the concept was cool
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Flow needs more direction
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Like the social aspect
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Need more consistent style
Results
From our takeaways we discovered we were going to really need to stick to our style guide and make the two different platforms of VR and mobile very similar in feel, look and interaction. This feedback gave us the thrust of confidence we needed to step towards our Hi-Fi Prototype.
FINAL RESULTS
After three weeks, our team of six empathized, defined, ideated, prototyped and tested a multi-modal platform that really met our user's needs by eliminating pain points of choosing gifts for loved ones while making it a joy to engage.
Next Steps:
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Voice commands + onboarding
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Incorporating AR;
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3D view of item in IRL home
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Further gamification
Lessons Learned:
Iteration overload: getting too carried away and forgetting the basics like components + grids