CHALLENGE
Enhance gift-giving experiences to align with individuals' expressed interests, ensuring that they receive meaningful and desired items thereby promoting a more enjoyable and sustainable gifting culture.
SOLUTION
This project takes a broader look at sustainability. It is dedicated to redefining the art of giving by enhancing personalized experiences to reduce waste.
HOW I HELPED
Design Researcher
Concept Development (Wireframing, Glide demo)
Prototyping (Glide demo)
Rendering/Visualization
Personalized gift giving with GiftBox
PROCESS
Can we improve sustainability in the gift-giving industry?
Ecodesign can be applied to address the product life cycle wheel in different industries.
When looking at the gift giving industry, often times people don’t know what to gift others and will buy anything to get the task done.
I wanted to look at how to prevent items from getting to the end of their life cycle in the first place.
Product Life Cycle
Product Life Cycle - Areas for Focus
Unwanted gifts are a pain!
When people are given gifts they don’t want, they are stuck with figuring out what to do with the item. There’s a couple things they could try:
Regifting - has social standards and perpetuates the problem
Return - sometimes resold but mostly send to the landfill
Donate - could be resold but a large issue of donation centers having too much stuff
Recycle - a large issue with recycling consumer goods is that items are too complex to break down, involve work from the user, and even if it done correctly, our recycling programs aren’t great.
Toss - the whole issue we are trying to solve!
Existing apps on the market include features like:
Ability to Share
Gift Ideas
Budget
Gift Exchanges
Gift tags
Preferences
Links to Outside Products
Holiday Themes
To create an app from a sustainability perspective, some features were relevant while many apps struggled in particular areas.
Existing gift giving apps
Users moving around app layouts
Users moving around app layouts.
Interactive user study.
I created interactive paper prototypes where users could explain what layouts made sense and move pages in a semi-constrained area.
I made a real app using Glide, an easy to use no code app builder that create ready to use apps from spreadsheets.
Real interactive prototype
Users were able to test a real app. A google forms survey asking them to complete certain actions and then report if these actions were able to be accomplished. I also asked how easy it was to complete.
From the gift receiver perspective, they can explicitly say what items they want and list their preferences on their profile page.
From the gift giver perspective, they can organize people in their life and collect ideas for them based on what they notice in conversation or see on social media.
People and Lists pages
Items and Profile Pages
GiftBox
GiftBox
