Sign & Send
A web based tool that allows people to add their personal touch to a greeting card.
Business Goal
Bring Hallmark into the digital age by creating a modern greetings experience.
Role
UX Designer
Background
The research, insights, innovation, and business teams had started doing a lot of research around the future of greeting cards and how our consumer could sign a real greeting card digitally.
Because this was a new cross-functional team, the project underwent so many timeline, tool, team, requirements and process changes in the attempt to be as agile as possible.
When I joined this project, the CX team had already started doing research to validate the journey and vision for this new tool. Part of their research was creating one of our personas, Laura.
Persona
Laura represents the caring, yet busy modern woman struggling to balance everything going on her life. She loves connecting with those around her, but often forgets or doesn't have time to show how much she cares in the way she would like to.
“I don’t have time to connect as much as I want. Help me easily do it all and look good.”
Reframing the Problem
How might we help Laura effortlessly connect with the people she cares about?
Preliminary Research
In order to understand and recommend an MVP version of this iterative project, I started to do some preliminary research.
I started by doing a competitive analysis of other personalized products. I put together a spreadsheet to directly compare competitive features. This allowed us to narrow down both the must haves and what could set us apart.
We also were able to start documenting common customization patterns that our persona, Laura, would already be familiar with.
I also wanted to understand both the stakeholder and consumer perspectives on what features to prioritize for MVP.
To narrow down what I would need to design, I created a stakeholder survey to rank personalization features. I also worked with the Research team to create a user survey to understand what Laura would be looking for in terms of greeting card customization.
The combination of this research created a solid requirements list and aligned the team.
User Journey
Once we had a starting point for our requirements list, I began to create user flows for the journey that Laura would go through to personalize a card. This included the full end to end experience from finding a card through checkout.
Although these flows were iterated on several time, is was so helpful to communicate and gain alignment with the team.
Wireframes
Now that I understood what the flows were and what needed to be on what page, I started sketching.
One of the main focuses of these wireframes were to really nail down the navigation. I knew that there was a huge backlog of features that would eventually be included so it had to be scalable and easy to go from one thing to another.
User Testing
We went through several rounds of user testing and iteration at various fidelities of design.
At the beginning, we were really wanting to get something in front of our consumer to discover what works, what doesn't, and get overall thoughts on the delight this feature could bring to someone like Laura.
User testing brought up a ton of positive feedback and sparked some usability improvements to things like navigation, features, and tools.
There were a lot of challenges for testing this feature in a static prototype. Because of this, we worked very closely with the development team so that we could continually test and iterate before launch.
Some of the things that kept bubbling up both from internal beta testers and from user tests were around image quality, performance, and how the complete flow feels when taking a photo of your actual handwriting.
Iteration
All of the feedback generally laddered up to this idea of improving the handwritten image quality. I worked closely with the product and development teams for how to improve the experience.
All of these improvements would help Laura feel more confident to add her personal touches and connect with someone she cares about.
Next Steps
How can we continually learn from Laura and help her connect with others in an even more personal way?