THE PROBLEM

Party Crown is an online boutique for craft activity boxes that can be sold as a one-off gift or an in-person or virtual party. The Party Crown helps customers participate in a fun activity through virtual parties during the pandemic. It can bring happiness during the pandemic as an individual gift or gathering use but can be fun social activities post-pandemic as well. The potential customers could be teenagers, parents, and college students. Tie-dye box, painting/canvas box, jewelry-making bead box are some examples of their products.

TIMELINE 

The duration of the project was about four weeks.

INTERESTING FACTS

A project with 4 UX designers! The Discovery step of the project was even changed and add to the ideas that originally provided to us to build the design upon it!

MY ROLE

• Qualitative research with conducting user research interviews

• Establish key user flow

• Created Interactive prototype in Figma

INITIAL RESEARCH

Objectives & Goals

To see who our competitors would be and how we can PCS can have an advantage we did:

• An in-depth research analysis to discover her main customer 

• Learn about the pain points users are currently encountering during the virtual parties or as individual fun indoor activities

• The best approach to her branding based on her target customer

• UI: Visual Design / Layout / Style Guide  

• Discover what other platforms are offering the same service as Party Crown

• Design a final form/hi-fi version of the Party Crown Social website - a way for the client to grow into her website

RESEARCH PLAN

• Competitive / Comparative Analysis

• User Interviews

• Affinity Mapping

• User Personas 

• Journey Map

• User Flow

• Tree Testing / Card Sorting

Comparative & Competitive Findings

In comparison, I analyze the most important features to users that came out from the user interviews. The essential features that we include in the final design are:

• Free Shipping

• Instruction Guides

• Personalizing

• Shipping to Multiple Addresses

• Product Finding

• Customer engagement

Research Interviews

• Planning

  • Most of the users expect to pay for supplies themselves when hosting

• Virtual Events

  • Some users don't feel like virtual parties mimic in-person events

• Activities

  • Most of the virtual parties had at least one kind of activity involved

• Supplies

  • Some user prefer to go in-store to get different options and deals

• In-person Events

  • Because of COVID-19, some are not comfortable participating in in-person parties

• Price points

  • People pay attention to the cost of party supplies 

Survey

With 13 questions on our survey, we wanted to find out about the age of users, the most popular boxes, learn about their interest to gift the boxes, so the result was:

• Age

  Ages 25-30 are interested in craft kits

• Kits

  Baking and painting were the most interesting option

• Gift

  57% of people would buy a craft box as a gift

From the findings of the research, we understood that the most important features to experience by the users are:

• Gifts guides

  Competitive analysis & survey showed that having a gift guide would be a used feature. 

• Checkout Process

  Creating a seamless checkout for sending to multiple addresses will eliminate frustration 

• Community-focused

  Engagement for kids to play games and interact on the site can create repeat customers for the brand 

DEFINE THE EXPERIENCE

From the findings of the research, we understood that the most important features to experience by the users are:

• Gifts guides

  Competitive analysis & survey showed that having a gift guide would be a used feature. 

• Checkout Process

  Creating a seamless checkout for sending to multiple addresses will eliminate frustration 

• Community-focused

  Engagement for kids to play games and interact on the site can create repeat customers for the brand 

PERSONAS

From the main pain points, we conducted a user persona and followed the path with her and her needs and goals.

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

I worked on the user flow and information architecture for our team.

Click on image to zoom.

We defined and designed our prototype navigation based on the information architecture that I finalized after tree testing.

USER TESTING

We ran 3round of testing and I did help the team with interviewing users. Below is the summary of them. 

The high-fidelity prototype was the final deliverable that you can explore. I was responsible to design the UX and UI of the desktop version.

Lesson Learned

• Teamwork is always a win! With the highly collaborative team, I was able to do the research and jump to the experience design, apply the changes after each iteration based on the human-centered design solutions.

• Sometimes the best solution is just in front of you, you just need to design, test, understand, improve and redesign. You just need to trust the research and design a solution for a widespread problem that can be used and appreciated by a broad audience.