Memento Box: Product Design

Introduction

The client approached the team at Prime Digital Academy with an idea to create an eco-friendly and more meaningful way to allow people to collaborate on e-cards to celebrate loved ones. Their idea came to us in a very vague form - their list of ideas covered a lot of ground, but had no tangible product.

Our goal was to help find a way for them to stick out from the competition, while fulfilling the user goals of making a collaborative tool to virtually celebrate loved ones in a meaningful way.

Methods and Deliverables

  • Desk research

  • Desirability Survey

  • Participatory Design

  • Usability Testing

  • Sketched Wireframing

  • Figma Prototype

  • Annotations

  • Research Presentation

Generative Research

In creating the Memento Box concept and prototype, the team performed four rounds of research. Since the team was starting from only a vague idea, we performed a lot of generative research at the start of the process.

  • The first round was secondary, desk research about the greeting card and e-card industries. This round included a competitive audit, and provided understanding of the competition and landscape of the market. The team was able to identify what holes exist in the market for this product to fill.

  • The second round was a survey - asking 12 users about their habits and emotions around celebrations, as well as getting feedback on which features would be most important to them in a new product. This helped guide the next round of ideation, in creating concepts that users would be interested in.

  • The third round was participatory design research - asking 6 users to look at low-fidelity prototypes and decide which version of the product held the most appeal. This set the path forwards for creating the high-fidelity prototype in Figma. It also generated more feature ideas.

These three rounds of research informed our design. The fourth round - usability testing - came after a prototype was created. In this round, users navigated through the prototype and performed key tasks. This identified pain points that were fixed, and highlighted what features of the product users liked the most.

All phases of the research are explained thoroughly below, in a slide deck that was delivered to our client.

Prototyping

The prototyping process for this product started with prototyping out the final product that people would receive. The team sketched out a few wireframes of different products, and we performed desirability/participatory design testing with them to deem what users wanted most.

The users landed on the idea of a virtual box with clickable assets that contain all of the content that people made for them.

Once we had that final product idea, we were able to prototype out the rest. We fleshed out the full idea for the product and all of the features, came up with a pricing model, and then divided and conquered to build out the rest of the site prototype.

Having the final product be our guide we were working backwards from helped a lot in keeping the product consistent and simple - two qualities that our client values, and that will make things easier for users to digest when interacting with a new product.

Usability Testing

The final round of iteration on this was Usability Testing, in the form of Think Aloud Evaluations, with three participants. These tests were helpful in identifying existing pain points, and also ascertaining how well users were able to understand the product.

All the users interviewed were very excited about the product, and there were no huge blockers for them as they navigated the “happy path” of the site. Our findings and fixes didn’t require any major overhauls of the site, but they were able to take it up to the next level - in both design and usability.

We also used this iteration time to formalize our style guide and make sure it was implemented throughout the site with consistent rules.

The Final MVP

Usability testing and a design review led to a full redesign of the prototype, and resulted in the final product below. Also included is a full breakdown of all of the pages and features with annotations explaining design decisions based on research.

What I learned and next steps

Included in the slide deck above are outlined next steps based on user research we performed but didn’t have time to implement.

This prototype concludes my team’s involvement in the project, but I am excited to see where the project goes moving forwards. This project was a huge growing experience - working as a design team, completing 4 rounds of research, and generating a prototype for an entirely new idea for the problem space and market. Going forwards, I will be taking the lessons learned here into other upcoming projects.