Kids' wishlists are problematic for parents, kids, or gift givers. The wishing, gifting, and thanking processes leave parents wanting more of the right things, fewer gifts that miss the mark, and meaningful participation from gift givers and kids.
Today, parents manually manage gift ideas through multiple siloed conversations with gift givers. Even when communication channels are seamless, parents struggle to come up with good gift ideas. In fact, in our research, parents reported asking for gifts they were not passionate about just to move the process along. As a result, families rarely feel great about the gifts their kids receive.
When the gift giving is done, writing personalized thank you notes feels like a burden. In our at-home research with families, we learned that thank-you notes are often written late at night, at the kitchen table, by the mom. Getting kids to participate in the thank-you process is not fun for kids or parents.
At Missive, we knew there was a better way to wishlist.
Research
I conducted dozens of in-person parent interviews and sent multiple rounds of surveys to 1,500+ parents of school aged children. The goal was to learn more about famlilies' approaches and pain points around gifts.
The main takeaway from these interactions is that the gift giving and receiving process balances moments of joy and excitement against stressful moments relating to the quality of gifts being given and the expectations around thanking gift givers.
The three pain points identified were as follows:
First, parents stress about creating a wishlist parents and kids don't feel great about.
Second, parents worry about receiving gifts that add clutter and which are not valued by the child.
And third, obligations to send timely, thoughtful thank-you notes add unwanted stress to the parents' lives.
The goal of the Concept phase was to map the three pain points illuminated during the research phase to product features and experience flows. During this phase, we developed three principle ideas to guide us:
Stories over lists. This includes media-rich gift profiles and parent-kid storytelling used to communicate the ideas and values that make gifts everybody feels great about.
Smart suggestions and meaningful mini lists. We needed to help parents build lists quickly with automated suggestions, ideas from families and friends, and expert Missive merchandisers. Research told us that parents were also looking for meaning, not just more stuff. In the concept phase, we developed ideas around bucketed "mini lists". With Missive, kids could ask for one item from each of these four buckets: What I Want, What I Need, What I Wear, What I Read.
Digital thank-you's. We wanted to empower parents and kids to have fun crafting thank-you’s with themes, add-ons and photos/videos that showcase the child’s love of the gift. We learned that many parents felt committed to the idea of sending hand written notes, and we knew Missive would need to compensate for the lack of traditional paper thank-you with a richer, video-based feature that would warm recipients.
Customer research informed one early design decision to turn Missive into a mobile-first company. We interviewed one mother of two young children in her home. We observed that she spent our conversation with one or both kids in her arms. We knew that Missive needed to be easy to use, on the phone, while using one hand while the other is occupied doing something else.
The Missive design embraced existing design patterns for e-commerce shopping, registry, and wishlists. This familiarity was important to our users for ease-of-use, and we recognized that our customers were looking to Missive for a new way to wishlist without wanting unnecessary noise added to their digital routines.
In the brand layer, the app relied on photography (what parent doesn't have a ton of pictures of their kids?) and a color scheme that was distinguished from other wishlist apps and kids sites by avoiding stereotypical girl-boy colors.
Missive succeed in the UX/UI layers of design including structure, skeleton, and surface. However, we missed the mark in the deeper layers of scope and strategy.
The product and design team struggled to integrate a successful partnership to complete our product catalog, which means that parents were limited asking for the right gifts for their kids.
Should we have focused exclusively on the thank-you experience instead of wishlists and thank-you's? The thank-you features such as video messages and interative cards addressed a real pain point and were addressable through roadmap items the Missive team controlled entirely on our own.