Parti is a platform that helps keep loved ones connected during the isolation of the pandemic by streamlining the process of how users send group digital greeting cards.
A group digital greeting card enables a user to gather and send messages or videos collectively to someone else to celebrate an occasion together.
I took on the lead role of our design team and was responsible for communicating with our client and managing the team. I played a major role in the idea conception, wireframing, and revisions. I also assisted with prototyping.
Team
Karen Alarcon | Jenny Lee | Lucy Kent
Role
User research, interaction, prototyping, usability testing
Duration
4 Weeks (80 Hours)
Project Overview
Problem
As lockdown restrictions have restricted our ability to safely gather with others, people are finding new ways to stay connected with their friends and family. This has led to a 23.9% increase in revenue for greeting card companies over the last year.
Sending group digital greeting cards is a popular alternative to attending events in person, but it can be time-consuming and difficult.
Solution
A group digital greeting card experience that automates the process of inviting users, gathering videos, and putting content together. By offering a centralized platform that guides users through the creation process, we reduce the likelihood of frustration and give users a simple way to stay connected with others.
Research
Competitive Analysis
In order to better understand how people send group greeting cards, I worked with a group of designers to examine existing platforms to find pain points that weren’t currently being addressed. We looked into Kudoboard, Tribute, and Vidday.
70% of ALL reviews mentioned they had questions during the creation process and had to contact support for assistance.
To determine specific issues people may have had, we did our own competitive audit and found these high level themes across our competitors: buttons aren’t intuitive, had trouble editing videos, and difficulties uploading own videos.
Pain Points
Creating board/montage is difficult without help
Can’t pick and choose videos to watch for montages
Limited core functionality and personalization
Pricey subscriptions (limited with free version)
Opportunities for Parti
Guide users through creating board
Offer multiple ways to view board for watching videos
Offer more background and customization features
More affordable platform
User Interviews
We spoke with 12 users who had experience creating, organizing, and receiving video montages. Due to the increase in millennial greeting card purchases and higher per-unit spending, we decided to target these individuals.
Through these interviews, we wanted to uncover:
Process of inviting users to contribute
Process of organizing/putting videos together
Process of recording/editing videos
What users are doing with these videos after
Pain points during these processes
Insights we found:
Users putting card together want to have centralized platform
Attracted to customization and will pay extra for more options
Users don’t mind length of final video, but want to easily choose videos to watch
Define
Personas
Using an affinity map, we synthesized our findings and aggregated them into three personas.
Three personas
Defining core objectives
Our research findings allowed me to narrow down the issue and develop these problem statements below:
Since organizers and recipients are likely to spend the most time on this platform, I decided to prioritize them first. Furthermore, we found that existing group ecard platforms were hard to use without adequate guidance, so I wanted to address this need as a top priority.
I defined the following objectives for our MVP:
Make it intuitive and easy to use without assistance
Streamline process of inviting, receiving videos, and putting content together
Create a quick and engaging watching/sharing experience
Allow simple recording/uploading from the platform
Keeping the business in mind
Defining business goals and user goals helped us develop feature requirements and strike a balance between helping the business while also ensuring the users had a great experience.
Success Metrics
To assess how we might achieve our goals, we came up with the following metrics to measure:
Task success rate of creating a board
Time spend putting board together
Number of customer support calls
Free to paid conversion rate
Task success rate of uploading & submitting videos
Conversion rate of recipients & contributors to organizers
Technical feasibility
With a better understanding of our problem space, we collaborated with the developers to prioritize our features based on impact vs effort. Because our budget and resources were limited, we did not have the bandwidth to accomplish everything we intended so we had to scale back objective 4.
Trade off we made
Why objective 4?
Feature is not core feature, can find workaround
Benefits of mobile site
Easy to upload videos from same device instead of going back and forth between devices
Allow invitations through text, more appealing to millennials
Customer Journey Map
I mapped out the emotional journey of an organizer creating a greeting card which allowed me to pinpoint the low points of users’ experiences, and find opportunities where the new features can be implemented to ease those negative feelings. By looking at the entire experience from creation to delivery, I am able to have a better understanding of all the steps involved and find ways to streamline this process.
Organizer creating greeting card
Ideate
Design decisions
We sketched out our own versions of each screen, then discussed them as a group, and voted on what we liked about each version before creating the final versions.
Sketching out multiple layouts of each page allowed us to test out different options and find the best solution.
Prototype
Final Design
Due to the short amount of time we had available, my team conducted usability testing focused on the main flows that users will interact with on the site.
Flows that were tested include:
Organizer creating a board
Organizer inviting contributors
Contributor uploading and submitting video
Recipient viewing video
Recipient thanking contributors
After testing, I compiled all the insights and revised our wireframes based on what was most critical.
Feature 1
Onboarded through an intuitive interface
Existing products lack an intuitive interface and provide short tutorials with little guidance.
I utilized tooltips which provide more context and walk them through key features, which can help improve task success rates for creating boards.
This also helps us streamline that process and addresses our business goal of reducing the need to contact assistance.
By including the side panel on the left with clearly labeled sections, users can easily access all the necessary tools needed to create a board.
Since users were looking for more personalization options, I've given them the ability to upgrade their boards with more access to backgrounds and media, text overlays and premium fonts.
Feature 2
Managing invitations & submissions in one place
Users found it overwhelming to manage inviting their contributors, gathering videos, and organizing content through a variety of external channels.
With our invitation integrations, users can easily invite people through different channels all in one place.
Additionally, videos will auto populate after they are submitted and reminders can be scheduled automatically to send out which solves frustration of receiving videos last minute.
All the core aspects of the creation process can be carried out within this platform, making it easier for them to manage and will ultimately reduce the time spent putting a board together.
Feature 3
Simplifying process of rewatching and sharing videos
By giving recipients the flexibility of viewing their videos on a board or played as a series of videos, we'll create a more personalized and simplified experience.
By encouraging users to apply filters or search for videos based on their preferences, users will be more inclined to go back and rewatch their videos.
Users are also encouraged to create an account in order to have access to curating playlists and downloading abilities.
Responsive Design
Simple uploading & submitting videos
But because of our constraints, I created a mobile-friendly website so that contributors could upload and submit their videos. Although users wanted to record directly via the platform, a mobile site reduces the back and forth between devices since they already use phones to record their videos. and is easier to implement
Contributors are guided through the steps of uploading, editing, and submitting their video. Users can also customize their videos by trimming videos, adding stickers, and adding text overlays.
The ability to add personal touches to their videos will attract more recipients who are more likely to become organizers.
Outcomes
After validation testing, here is the impact of our MVP:
100% of users were able to successfully invite contributors and create board
Users took on average 5 minutes to put board together
100% of users had no problem uploading and submitting video
Users loved the flexibility of the different ways to view their board
Design System
As we were designing our wireframes, we added components into this design system in order to keep things consistent and scalable for both the design and engineering team. We decided to adapt to an existing design system we found in Figma in order to be efficient with our time and budget. We also took inspiration from other popular design systems like Carbon, Atlassian, and Human Interface Guidelines in order to understand their behavior and how to properly use them.
These design principles were used to create this system:
Intuitive
Engaging
Simplicity
Efficiency
Reflection
Challenges & What I Learned
Using data to inform design decisions
As I was articulating my design decisions to our client, he favored one of the explorations that we didn’t want to move forward with. I had to ask him questions to better understand his perspective, but also make sure to backup my reasonings behind my decision. Since I was unable to convince him, I decided to run A/B testing with users in order to gather feedback. Using those findings, I was able to successfully justify my decisions with our client and move forward with that exploration.
Not everything is a linear process
Working with developers and discovering certain constraints and limitations helped me realize that things aren't always linear. To manage your limited resources, budget, and time effectively, it is important to prioritize certain tasks and make tradeoffs.
What I would do Differently
Accessibility
Due to our timeline, we didn't have the opportunity to evaluate accessibility as much as I would have liked. But if i was go back, i would put accessibility first and consider darkening our brand colors to give them more contrast as well as increase our font sizes. I would also like to include a feature to allow for text to speech.
Next Steps
There are a couple features we would like to add that was beyond our mvp:
Next 6 months
Evaluating personalization through tests for more features
Measure adoption rate through user data
Future
Adoption as a plugin on social media platforms
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