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JOyis custom mobile app design
Overview & Problem Statement
The co-founders of this company noticed a gap in the gift-giving market. They wanted a place where they could provide a list of preferences of foods, flowers, and other smaller items along with reminders of their friends' birthdays, anniversaries, and other important dates so that they could easily send small gifts that they knew would be appreciated by the recipient. When they couldn't find this available, they decided to build it themselves. With Joyis, they've created a central repository to remember all of their contacts' important dates, along with a default list of gifts and quick pick-me-ups to send to their friends.
The problem with this was trying to figure out how to make the onboarding process fun rather than tedious, and how to ensure that it was user-friendly and intuitive enough that anyone could use it.
Users & Audience
The users are people who are busy but want to keep up with the important dates of the people in their lives without having to use a paper calendar, and for those who want to be able to give thoughtful gifts that they know will be well-received by their friends, no matter the occasion.
Roles & Responsibilities
I was the sole designer and user experience consultant on this project. My responsibilities included designing the entire mobile application, presenting designs to the client, soliciting and implementing feedback, prototyping the designs, and handing off the designs to development.
Process
The process started by interviewing the clients to get an idea of their vision for the overall look and feel of the application. Following that, I was able to work with my team to define the requirements.
Once we had requirements outlined, I created a Jira board breaking down the requirements into sprints and got designing.
The challenge at the onboarding stage was trying to figure out the best way to spark a user's memory when thinking about their favorite items without creating an endless scrolling page. When thinking about how to overhaul the onboarding process to make it smoother and more fun, I wireframed a few different ideas including a card slider, a single illustration, a map-like collage with labels, and a couple other options. In the end, the client decided to go with the card slider and a single image with comboboxes below to display more options.​
Once that was complete, the rest of the app came together easily, with sprint retros ensuring that the clients were up to date on the progress at every stage and able to give feedback early and often.
Throughout the process, I checked in weekly with our lead developer to ensure that the app stayed within budget.
After the first version of the design was done, I prototyped it and sent a link to the clients so that they could get feedback from some of their beta testers and advisors. Our team then compiled a spreadsheet of the feedback and we went over it with the client to see what changes they wanted to implement.
The final step was further iteration based on the feedback, a final review of the designs with the clients and prototyping a final version of the application before sending everything off to the developer.
Outcomes & Results
Looking back on this project, and where the app started, the designs definitely made the onboarding process more fun and user friendly and the app as a whole is incredibly intuitive. The clients started off with a different firm, who put more thought into the functionality of the app rather than the actual user experience. I truly believe in the "design first" approach as it offers for more consideration of the user and iteration than if a project were to go straight into development. This project was an excellent example of that.
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