Amazon.com
chip-in feature

meri@23visuel.com

Problem

The idea of Wedding/Baby showers is great until you realize that most of the gifts bought on registries are on the cheaper side.

Why is that and how can we fix it?
What I realized is that conventional gift-giving normally has the following rules:
  1. stay within a certain spending limit
  2. it's OK to go over the spending limit for a family member
  3. contribute and buy an expensive gift with friends.
These assumptions were my foundation for the "chip-in" feature project that I have worked on. I chose Amazon’s platform as a test ground for my MVP.

Competitive analysis

The custom of contributing for gifts has existed forever, and this by itself is a strong competition. One pitfall to it is that in order to contribute, you have to know who else is also contributing. An online version removes the requirement for people to know each other, this way the number of contributors potentially increases.

The choice of Amazon was easy:
  1. selection of product categories makes it easy to use for all kinds of gift registries,
  2. there are no service fees, and
  3. Amazon gift registries are used rarely (per my findings) which, I believe, makes Amazon more open to find it's niche.
  • Team: Meri Harutyunyan
  • Functions: Concept, User Research,
    User Flow & Wireframes
  • Tools: UXpin, Google Draw,
    Illustrator, Photoshop
  • Delivered: 2016

User Research

I came up with hypotheses about users, and created an interview plan. Over the next couple of weeks, I spent time interviewing and learned that some of my assumptions were completely wrong.

As a result, 3 personas were created, with a primary one being an immigrant IT worker. I had some very interesting findings that helped me design my feature with specific solutions for every persona.

Brainstorming, Affinity Diagram, User Flow, etc.

Next thing was to work on IA for the feature, which wasn't much considering the size of the project.
I created an affinity diagram to break down content into pages, which made me realize that my approach should be breaking down actions and mini-features from the affinity diagram by the user type.
I used a venn diagram for that, and a lot of initial "pages" from the affinity diagram immediately turned into sub-content of existing pages in Amazon registry platform.

An algorithmic view of user flow was created then, which took care of both of the flows: for the gift registry owner and for the gift registry buyer.
It also took care of the scenario in which a gift doesn't reach its goal and the money raised needs to be withdrawn.*

* the user flow is designed to support the interaction with the feature only. It doesn't account for all the other actions supported by existing flows.

Prototypes

Lo-fi prototypes were created using UXpin. Iterations were done in Photoshop with lots of changes in hi-fi mockups.

Constraints

My solution doesn't have answers to a couple of questions:
- How do we manage price variations of an item during chipping-in?
- What will happen if an item is out of stock by the time funds have been raised for purchase?

Though no work has been done to answer these questions, I gave them thought and am happy to discuss more.

go to portfolio