Gifting

Merchants wanted to enable their customers to give services or goods as a gift to their friends and family. Because these would be a gift given by a trusted source, the end result would be an increase in customer base and revenue. Our challenge was to create the interface for setting up the gift card in the Recurly platform and to create the hosted experience for the merchant's customers.

Project goals
Increase the merchant's customer base

Deliver this feature before the holiday gift-giving season

Discovery

Research

The first step for this project was to interview some of the meaningful Recurly merchants. Appointments were set up to interview both the users who would be using the product on a daily basis as well as those who would be setting up strategy and marketing around the promotional offerings.

Building the team

This project marked the beginning of an entirely new team of engineers who were also new to Recurly. Because they were based in Boulder, the Product Manager and I flew there for a week to get to know them and to share our research about Gift Cards.

Defining the problem

I facilitated a Design Sprint using the Google Ventures methodology. This was extremely well received and the team came away with a solid understanding of the proposed project.

Narrowing Focus

Deciding what to test

Knowing that we couldn't cover the entire gifting experience in our 5-day sprint, the team decided which aspect of the project to focus on. First, we identified all the target user types for the product. Then we narrowed the focus to the merchant and the gifter.

A lot of sketching later...

I led the team through a series of drawing exercises where many ideas were generated. We then narrowed down our focus and decided what to present to users in our test sessions.

Validating Assumptions

User testing

Based on the problems we wanted to solve, we decided to have two prototypes for the first round of user testing - one created for the perspective of the Recurly merchant and one for the merchant's customer.

Merchant experience prototype

Test goal: Can the merchant successfully create and set up a gift card offering for their customers?

End customer prototype

Test goal: Can the customer successfully purchase a gift card for a friend?

Clip from a test participant

Here's a short clip from one of the remote moderated user testing sessions. As you can image, we gained a lot of insight from these sessions.

What we learned

Although the merchants we spoke with during the interview phase were asking for some very specific features, we wanted to validate these ideas further. The prototype allowed us to explore the value of these ideas and prioritize which should be included the MVP release:

Printing a PDF - this could be accomplished by printing the email confirmation, thereby eliminating the need to code this as a separate feature. The test participants were ok with this idea.
Physically mailing a gift card - only one of the merchants we spoke with desired this feature and this could be accomplished by using an additional third-party service
Purchasing multiple gift cards at one time - while this was a desirable feature, the time to implement was seen as being too lengthy for the MVP.

Building the Product

Personas

I created personas based on what we learned from interviewing the merchants. I was also able to create personas for their customers after hearing what they thought their ideal customer would be.

User flows

Next, I created flow diagrams to document all the scenarios that needed to be covered. The team would polish these in our weekly design review and planning meetings

The visuals and final specifications

At this stage, I was able to move forward with creating the visual components of the app.

Working with marketing

I worked with another designer in marketing and a product marketing specialist to come up with how to present the feature to existing and new users of Recurly.

Gift Card Launch

The MVP release

We released on time and received positive feedback from our key customers.Final marketing material can be found here. One of my favorite things about this is the amount of detail that came from the design sprint that ended up being presented in the marketing strategy.