Parti is a responsive website that helps keep loved ones connected during the isolation of the pandemic by streamlining the process of how users send group digital greeting cards.

A group digital greeting card enables a user to gather and send messages or videos collectively to someone else to celebrate an occasion together.

As the team's lead UX designer, I was in charge of communicating with our client and managing the team. I played a major role in the idea conception, problem statements, wireframing, and revisions.

Team

Karen Alarcon | Jenny Lee | Lucy Kent

Role

User research, interaction, prototyping, usability testing

Duration

4 Weeks (80 Hours)

Research

Competitive Analysis

In order to better understand how people send group ecards, I worked with a group of designers to examine existing platforms to find pain points that weren’t currently being addressed. We looked into Kudoboard, Memento, and Vidday.

70% of ALL reviews mentioned they had questions during the creation process and had to contact support for assistance

Market Research

Although our client initially described our target audience as being tech savvy millennials, we discovered that existing platforms actually cater to non-tech savvy baby boomers.

We did another round of secondary research in order to:

• Validate the target audiences

• Explore other possible use cases

• Learn more about their habits and behaviors

Due to the increase in millennial greeting card purchases and higher per-unit spending, we decided to target these individuals.

User Interviews

We spoke with 12 users who had experience creating, organizing, and receiving video montages.

Through these interviews, we wanted to uncover:

1. Process of inviting users to contribute

2. Process of organizing/putting videos together

3. Process of recording/editing videos

4. What users are doing with these videos after

5. Pain points during these processes

Insights we found:

• Users putting card together want to have centralized platform

• Attracted to customization and will pay extra for more options

• Users don’t mind length of final video, but want to easily choose videos to watch

Define

Personas

Using an affinity map, we synthesized our findings and aggregated them into three personas.

Defining core objectives

Our research findings allowed me to narrow down the issue and develop these problem statements below:

Since organizers and recipients are likely to spend the most time on this platform, I decided to prioritize them first. Furthermore, we found that existing group ecard platforms were hard to use without adequate guidance, so I wanted to address this need as a top priority.

I defined the following objectives for our MVP:

1. Make it intuitive and easy to use without assistance

2. Streamline process of inviting, receiving videos, and putting content together

3. Create a quick and engaging watching/sharing experience

4. Allow simple recording/uploading from the platform

Keeping the business in mind

Defining business goals and user goals helped us develop feature requirements and strike a balance between helping the business while also ensuring the users had a great experience.

Success Metrics

To assess how we might achieve our goals, we came up with the following metrics to measure:

• Total number of organizers that can invite contributors and create a board without any assistance

• Total time it takes for an organizer to invite contributors and put a board together

• Total number of contributors that can successfully upload and submit their videos to the platform

Technical feasibility

With a better understanding of our problem space, we collaborated with the developers to prioritize our features based on impact vs effort. Because our budget and resources were limited, we did not have the bandwidth to accomplish everything we intended so we had to scale back objective 4.

How will our users use our product?

We mapped out the flow of how each of our personas would navigate through our platform in order to complete a task.

Ideate

Design decisions

We sketched out our own versions of each screen, then discussed them as a group, and voted on what we liked about each version before creating the final versions.

Sketching out multiple layouts of each page allowed us to test out different options and find the best solution.

Feature 3

Simplifying process of rewatching and sharing videos

Recipients have the flexibility of viewing their videos on a board or played as a series of videos. Users can also select and filter by specific tags to see videos based on their preferences.

Allowing users to curate their own playlists and share them with others allows them to relive these special moments.

Responsive Design

Uploading, editing,

Our interviews revealed that users mainly record videos using their phones, so I opted to build a mobile-friendly site to accommodate their needs.

Contributors are guided through the steps of uploading, editing, and submitting their video. Users have the option to trim their videos and customize their videos with stickers and text overlays if desired.