Giftbomb: A Feature Integration

Overview:

Giftbomb is a mobile gift card app that is looking to disrupt the manner in which consumers purchase and distribute gift cards, by encouraging and supporting both spontaneous and scheduled gifting that surprises and delights recipients. Their mission is to enable thoughtful giving. They do this by partnering only with local businesses, which also strengthens local communities. The digital nature of the gifting also helps to reduce plastic consumption and a portion of their proceeds is pledged to support local causes. The Giftbomb app currently allows individuals to search for and purchase digital gift cards for a variety of quality, local businesses. In turn, users can digitally send or “gift” those certificates to friends or family, even those not currently using the app. As Giftbomb grows, they would like to consider ways in which they can increase user engagement while reflecting the product value and supporting the company’s mission

Business Objectives

1. Increase user engagement:

   As Giftbomb grows, they would like to consider ways in which they can encourage users to spend more time in the app in a meaningful way.  

2. Convey the value of merchants:

   Merchants are carefully and deliberately curated in order to ensure their value and user satisfaction with purchased gift cards. (Currently, only merchants with a Facebook and/or Google rating of 4.0 or higher, depending on amount of reviews provided, are allowed to be featured.) This value is core to the app’s service delivery and could be more effectively communicated to potential and current gifters/recipients.

3. Include a sense of human emotion:

   The app’s experience could be enhanced by introducing a clear human connection to the emotions felt when giving and receiving gifts. Furthermore, key interactions could more meaningfully convey the organizational values of community, connectedness, and sustainable gifting.

User Journey Map

To uncover pain points in using the application I made a user journey map to see which part of the experience can be fixed or make better. This uncovered an “aha” moment when I found an opportunity to leverage an already happy moment with seeing the categories to add in other exciting ways to pick from, like a charity. I integrated this into my next step of making feature cards.

Feature Cards

After doing a deep dive into their system, I saw what features they did and what they did not. To quickly get to the bottom of which features were valuable our design team quickly prototyped out designs to see what features would be easily integrated into their existing system. After working with Giftbombs developers, I was able to get a better sense of what features would be able to go forward.

Kano Analysis

To see which features would be most valuable, it was decided that a kano analysis would be the best way to see what the users would like to see in the application. We sent a survey to both high activity users of giftbomb as well as some that have used the application once or twice, so we can have a good balance of actual users.

Talking with Developers

In order to see which features should be deployed, we had the developers of Giftbomb come in and show us how long each of the functions it would take to implement. This gave us great insight on the strategy we would take to make a final pitch to our stakeholder.

Although some of the features we prototyped, this showed how realistic it was to put into production. Making sure to communicate with developers helped put into prospective the cost and time it would take; thus giving us a different prospective.

Going Forward

As a deliverable I sent over my findings and recommendation report to show what to integrate into the next 6-8 week development sprint. To view the pdf of the report click here

or click on the image to the right to view