🎁 Designing a Send-a-Gift feature for BeautyMNL
Product Design
Marketing
Visual Design
With COVID-19 limiting access to physical shopping and giving of gifts, local e-Commerce platform BeautyMnl initiated a feature that ensures a seamless process of gift-giving – from shopping to delivery – for its users.
Client
BeautyMnl
Duration
1 month Nov-Dec 2020
My Role
For this project, I worked as the UX/UI Designer. I worked with 3 Web Developers (one of which was the Project Manager), 1 iOS Developer, and 2 Android Developers.
Scope of Work
UX Research
Competitive Analysis
Wireframing & Sketching
UI Design
Prototyping
Project Management
01 What problem were you trying to solve? Why?
'Tis the season of holiday campaigns, gifts, and most-of-all – shopping! In this holiday season, with a pandemic in the backdrop, shopping for gifts has become more difficult a task than it was before. Apart from finding the perfect gift - wrapping, personalization, and delivery are primary considerations when buying what to get our loved ones. We wanted to make sending a gift for our users as seamless as possible, from selecting the ideal gift to delivering it directly under their Christmas trees. This project was also initiated as an additional year-end effort to boost revenue for the company.
Objectives
Increase customer spend by encouraging users to purchase not just for themselves but also their loved ones. Provide hassle-free shopping & gift-giving experience for our customers through a dedicated flow for sending gifts
Technical Constraints
Limited Time. Project feature had to be deployed by December 11, 2020, in time for BeautyMnl's 12.12 Sale. 
 Limited Development Resources. There are limited developers allotted to work on the project: 1 iOS developer, 1 Android developer, 2 full-time Full Stack Developers, and 1 Full Stack Developer that works intermittently
02 What steps did you take?
Competitive Analysis: How we settled on Send as Gift
With the goal of increasing revenue during the holidays in mind, the team came up with some initial features that may drive up customer spend such as: Send as gift Electronic Gift Cards Shareable Wishlists
We started our competitive analysis by looking what leading worldwide Beauty platforms such as Sephora, Ulta, Glossier are doing. We also looked into e-commerce giant Amazon, as well as our other Southeast asian competitors such as Lazada, Shopee, Zalora, and Grab.
💡 Insight
A "Send as Gift Option" is usually available on international or US-based e-Commerce platforms. This option allows the user to include a note and select wrappers and/or packaging for gift-specific orders. Interestingly, said feature is not a common for Southeast Asian e-Commerce platforms. The only alternative is providing an alternative recipient details.
💡 Insight
Redeeming Gift Cards during checkout  was a consistent feature in most platforms we reviewed.

What was interesting to note, however, was that some platforms don’t sell their gift cards on-site, Instead, they are sold on third-party sites such as CashStar (Sephora and Ulta), Gifted.PH (Shopee & Lazada), Giftaway.PH, etc.
💡 Insight
All websites we’ve reviewed made use of wishlists, some of which are shareable via links.

‍Only Amazon allows a user to create customizable wishlists (labels, products, etc.) which they can also later share.

‍
💡 Final Decision
Based on the insights we’ve gathered and considering the interest of time, we had to handpick which of the initial 3 features we were going to build. We’ve then identified that Send as Gift would be the best option for its revenue-generating potential, feasibility, and that it’s already something our users wanted.
Identifying the user
The main users of the Send as Gift feature are Gift-Givers aka new and existing customers who wish to send a gift to their loved ones.
💡 Why Gift Givers
Choosing gift-givers as our primary target users guarantee conversion, as opposed to Wishlisters aka those who share their wishlists to family & friends. Friends and family of Wishlisters may opt to buy from an alternative source or purchase an alternative gift altogether.
How might we create a seamless and complete gift-giving process for users?
After a quick round of interviews with 4 randomly selected BeautyMnl users, we collated the following User Stories which were categorized by the stage in their gift-giving process.
Iteration 1: Emulate the real-world gift-giving process
Based off of our initial interviews, we’ve created user flows and wireframes of the most ideal gifting process. With all of the considerations of users’ in mind, we've highlighted the necessary subfeatures such as
Recipient Details Section Personalization via Note Personalization via Adding Note Personalization via Packaging
Scheduling Delivery Tracking via SMS Tracking via Tracking Link
💡 User Flow
As the sender, I want to create, personalize, and send out my gift to my desired recipient.
💡 User Flow
As the sender, I want to create, personalize, and send out my gift to my desired recipient.
Early iteration of the Send as Gift mockups
Iteration 2 & 3: Prioritizing Send as Gift to its MVP and Improving Ease of Use
Due to aforementioned constraints, we had to focus on stripping down initial iteration of the Send as Gift feature. Additionally, we had to shift the creative direction to those set by the BeautyMnl Brand & Marketing team. For the product team, our goal became to create a seamless flow from shopping → cart → send as gift → payment → order tracking.
Early iteration of the Send as Gift mockups
03 What did you learn from this project?
💡 Learning
Tap into pertinent departments involved earlier. The urgency required for the project to be conceptualized, proposed, and executed left the project team scrambling for time to tap into the other departments involved in this holiday campaign. Later on, after the initial set of features were conceptualized, it would have been best early on to assess their feasibility with the respective teams prior to starting on with the design work.
💡 Learning
Start with the most ideal solution, but at the end of the day, sustaining incremental change is best. A lot of initial features of the project had to be cut down in order to make the tight deadline. However, these constraints allowed the team to focus on completing an MVP that took advantage of improvements targeting ease of use.
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