GoPro Inc
Empower customers to build stronger bonds through the art of gift-giving.
Role
Contractor
Team
Forrest Kim, Shin Ning Chan, Sunny Park, Asfaha Asfaha
Timeline
Jan 2022- May 2022
Methods
Stakeholders Interview, Market Research, Literature Review, User Flow, Wireframe, Prototype, User Testing
Context
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. In anticipation of the upcoming holiday season, GoPro sought to establish a true gifting experience.
Solution & Impact
We researched and designed an end-to-end gifting experience for GoPro. Our solution provided a baseline for GoPro to jump-start its gifting project after a hiatus and was successfully implemented for its holiday season update in Q4 of 2022.
Core Recommendations
Establish a dedicated gifting page with effective entry points.
Immediately inform and reassure users about the availability of gifting as an option.
Provide a curated list of gift recommendations based on relationship, interest, etc.
Help users make easier purchasing decisions by surfacing suitable products.
Allow opportunities for personalizing the gifts.
Enable users to add a unique personal touch to an online and delivered gift.
Problem
The temporary gifting solution was a mere workaround. Customers had to contact customer service to facilitate the transfer of the gift. In addition, they had to provide their login information to let their recipients use the GoPro Subscription.
Research Goals
To identify stakeholder's need(s) to create a new gifting experience
To understand the underlying psychology of e-commerce gifting
To align research insights with customer's needs across the gifting experience
Stakeholders Interview
Recognizing the intricacies of GoPro's product and service offerings, we decided to take a step back to understand the ultimate business value of this new gifting experience. Key stakeholders, including the Director of Product and Head of Subscriptions, a Senior Product Designer, and a Senior UX Researcher, were engaged in the interviews to inform our strategic direction.
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 the following companies: Headspace, Masterclass, Disney+, Calm, Twitch, etc.
▲ MasterClass gift membership options
▲ MasterClass gift message and gift delivery method
▲ Headspace gift subcsription options
▲ Headspace e-card design
Literture Review
Due to time constraints, we were keen to gather insights on the common practices for eCommerce gifting. We focused on information derived from eye-tracking, user testing, and diary studies as presented in articles published by the Baymard Institute and Nielsen Norman Group.
Design Guideline
As a team, we reviewed and synthesized our research, which helped us generate design guiding principles to inform our next steps.
Iteration
Our initial user flow focused on different scenarios of gifting. Based on the research insights and edge cases provided by our GoPro clients, we charted out all the possible paths a gifter would take on the GoPro website in order to purchase a gift.
Then, we laid out a logic flow dedicated to the gifter’s interaction on the website. The logic flow presented creative opportunities for gift awareness, gift 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.
To ease the design process, we focused on designing the happy flow. Our clients and the team went through several rounds of design auditing before we prototyped and tested our solutions.
Unclear UX Writing
Customers were confused by the language we used in the subtitles and CTA buttons. They believed that only that specific GoPro camera HERO10 on the banner was giftable. Thus, we eliminated misleading language to make the call to actions more straightforward and intuitive.
Landing Page (Before Testing)
Landing Page (After Testing)
Checkout Page (Before Testing)
Checkout Page (After Testing)
Gifting Page (Before Testing)
Gifting Page (After Testing)
User Testing
We evaluated our design decisions with usability testing. We recruited 8 GoPro and 8 non-GoPro customers to test our prototype and improved our solutions based on the results.
Information Overload
Customers were thrown off by the overwhelming amount of information presented on the gifting page. We decided to clean up the visual design to reduce mental load and use positive, actionable language to encourage users to purchase gifts.
Clarity
Customers thoroughly enjoyed the customization features in the checkout. However, they wished there was more detail in whose information we were collecting and how the gift and gift message would be delivered. We added subtitles to improve the clarity of the delivery process.
Reflection
If we 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.
Work with client’s design systems.
GoPro graciously provided their design system. Initially, navigating it was quite challenging due to recent updates and the need for new components tailored to this project. We collaborated with the client to develop new components and integrate them seamlessly with the existing design systems.
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.