Wish - Birthday App
Project
Overview
Wish is a mobile app which enables you to wish your near ones on their birthdays through reminders, gift plans, engagement stories that keeps your bond alive.
Role
My role as a sole designer was to be a User Research, UX designer, Wireframe Designer, Visual Designer at different stages to make an useful engaging mobile app.
Timeline: 2 months
Problem statement
Remembering our close ones birthdays seems hard amidst our busy life. There are no apps that helps users send birthday wishes, that’s easy to use, without added burden of manual entry and that which is interesting and engaging.
Solution
To create a more engaging, intuitive interaction beyond birthday reminders, a sustainable and fun to use app.
challenges
- An app that is better than the competitors.
- More than an reminder app and to keep it more engaging.
- Aesthetically pleasing and intuitive design flow
- Creating reminiscing memories even today and bringing users closer.
Approach
Ux process doesn’t follow a linear methodology. But for the purpose of case study, I have curated the idea in a linear fashion in the following category:
Constraints
“Sometimes perfection is not the end goal but usability is.”
Keeping in mind the real life where we don’t have endless time to work, I made it a constraint to keep a 2 month timeline.
Competitive market analysis
Although the different competitive markets did inspire me. There was no other birthday app that brought engagement, simplicity, creating memory and personalizing capabilities as Wish. Following were some of the mobile apps focusing on similar target audience:
Birthdays: Had lot of manual entry with import only from phone contacts.
Birthday wishes: Had only greeting cards and no other way to connect via social media.
Research
Key phase of empathy started with research of my target audience by talking to people and asking them what are the words associated with birthdays and wishes that comes to their mind.This gave a good hint of what they should feel while and after using wish.
2. One of the key conversation/Interview with a customer that sums up a large set of target audience.
User Persona:
information architecture
StoryBoard
WIREFRAMES
Branding Guide
HIGH FIDELITY - WIREFRAMES
Sign up and creating list from your phonebook and social media platforms.
Main Boards on a usual day and on days when your friend has their birthday.
Other screens show how you can add new user details.
Details about the friends profile, gift ideas, settings page.
Greeting cards, customizable groups, wished profiles.
Here is collection of all pictures from your other social media or capture a moment, add gifs, custom text and send wishes.
user flow diagram - detailed
Working Prototype
Alternatives
There were ideas like gift cards linked to amazon was considered but realized adding features would make it too vague an app and was discarded.
Wanted to remove even greeting cards section because most of us use modern means to convey our wishes but considering elders who may benefit from it, I retained it.
Most of them who reviewed, liked the memories idea and felt more connected to their friends and family through their old shared pictures from social media platforms.
Take Aways
This was a huge learning experience. Improved my hands on with Sketch and Invision tools and how to take decisions at crucial moments and go with alternatives. After the project, I think the most useful was to practice the UX methods. These methods like user flow, information architecture, personas, scenarios, can help me analyze requirements, understand what users really want. It also let me focus on solving problems in an agile fashion.
View more of my works
