GoPro is a tech company that manufactures action cameras and develops complementary mobile apps with video-editing software. GoPro also offers a subscription service that provides free exchange service, automatic upload, unlimited cloud storage, and more.
Project Overview
In preparation for the upcoming holiday season, GoPro aimed to create an end-to-end gifting experience. I spearheaded the user flow, wireframing, and prototyping sessions, playing a key role in shaping the solution. Our design provided a baseline for GoPro to jump-start its gifting project and was successfully implemented in Q4 of 2022.
Role
User Experience Consultant
(Design Ideation Lead)
Duration
Jan 2022 - May 2022
Team
Forrest Kim, Shin Ning Chan,
Sunny Park, Asfaha Asfaha
Going Back to Before the Redesign…
Kristie is a mother who wants to buy a GoPro for herself and her son, Klay, an avid skier.
Kristie’s concerns about gifting the wrong product, along with the complexities of GoPro’s offerings and the cumbersome gifting process, led to frustration. As a result, Kristie, like many other GoPro customers, submitted complaints about her experience.
Product Research
To address these customer complaints, our team decided to take a step back and conduct user experience research with the following objectives in mind.
Stakeholders Interview
As contractors new to GoPro, we initiated conversations with key stakeholders to build rapport and understand the business need behind the project—specifically, why now. The key stakeholders, including the Director of Product, Head of Subscriptions, Senior Product Designer, and Senior UX Researcher, participated in the interviews to help inform our strategic direction.
A Personal Aha Moment!
Initially, I hesitated to ask what I thought might be an unthoughtful question—why not consider a simple gift card solution, like those offered by companies such as Nike, Starbucks, or Netflix, to resolve the complexity of GoPro's offerings? However, I eventually raised the question, and it led to an insightful discussion about the deeper meaning of gifting. This conversation highlighted the intimate nature of the art of gifting, which ultimately led to the personalization piece in the final solution. I learned that truly understanding the essence of stakeholders' asks is crucial to creating designs that are both meaningful and impactful.
Market Research
After gathering internal insights, our team was interested in observing and learning from how other eCommerce platforms dealt with online gifting, especially for subscription-based products. We conducted extended SWOT analysis for Headspace, Masterclass, Disney+, Calm, Twitch, etc.
Literature Review
Due to time constraints and the current stage of this project, we reviewed studies on eCommerce gifting practices instead of recruiting GoPro customers. We focused on findings from eye-tracking, user testing, and diary studies published by the Baymard Institute and Nielsen Norman Group.
Design Guidelines
As a team, we reviewed and synthesized our research, which helped us generate design guiding principles to inform our next steps.
User Flow
Based on research insights and edge cases provided by our GoPro clients, we mapped out the ideal path Kristie would follow on the GoPro website to purchase a gift for Oliver and for herself. The user flow revealed creative opportunities for gift awareness, selection, and the checkout process.
Before delving into design, I guided my teammates to brainstorm solutions with crazy 8s. I listed some guiding questions to generate creative solutions for gift awareness, gift selection, and the checkout process. Through this exercise, I came up with several personalization ideas in checkout–which our client, GoPro, really encouraged me to further explore and work on later in the process.
Design Ideation
Our clients and the team went through several rounds of design auditing before we prototyped and tested our solutions.
Low-Fidelity Wireframe & Design Critique
We evaluated our design decisions with user testing. We recruited 8 GoPro and 8 non-GoPro customers to test our prototype and improved our solutions based on the results. I led the testing process from planning and execution to synthesizing the findings.
Landing Page Prototype
Landing Page Testing Recommendations
User Testing
Gifting Guide Prototype
Gifting Guide Testing Recommendations
Checkout Page Prototype
Checkout Page Recommendations
Reflection
If I had more time…
Personal Growth
Validate designs with more users
We learned a lot from user-testing our high-fidelity wireframes. We would like to test and iterate our wireframes for more rounds to refine our design solution.
Conduct more in-depth research on different types of users
Our solution focused on developing the simplest path that a user would take to gift a GoPro product. Yet, we are also interested in understanding and designing for different target users. (A parent gifting a high-school filmmaker might be very different from a friend gifting a snowboarder in their thirties).
Be intentional. Ask good questions.
When GoPro first presented its prompt, our team believed that gift cards were a potential solution that would resolve the complexity of physical products and subscriptions. Questioning our clients in the first meeting was not easy. However, our client’s response gave us more in-depth insights into what our stakeholders were looking for in gifting – which even prompted me to emphasize personalization in the checkout process.
There is no standard research process.
Our clients suggested we research the best practices of eCommerce gifting and focus more on designing the gifting process. This gave us more time to validate our designs with user testing at the end. I learned that a problem can be resolved more effectively if we select the right method based on its problem scope and the state of the problem.
A HUGE thank you to Shinichi and Alyssa from the GoPro team for their continuous support and mentorship. Thank you for all the guidance you have provided to my team. I have become a more confident, curious researcher and designer after this project :D
And thank you to Sunny, Shin, Asfaha, and Forrest from my Berkeley Innovation team for their hard work and for being constant inspirations to me. Thank you for becoming some of my best friends at Berkeley.
