P&G Baby Registry
This was the semester long project I worked on in my very first UX Experience Studio. It was an incredible opportunity and experience to get to work with a sponsor from P&G for this project. I'd like to clarify that this was not an internship and I was not working for any company, it was an opportunity through the class to have a corporate sponsor guide us through the project and they had no say in my personal involvement with the project. Nevertheless, it was a great learning opportunity and I seriously enjoyed working on it through the semester.
Project Goals
Our Goal with this project was to promote the purchasing of P&G branded diapers through Amazon's baby registry. Right off the bat, we identified Gifters and Creators as the two main user groups and through further exploration of our problem space we would identify the best opportunities to promote diaper products.
Process
For this project, my team was made up of students of varying levels of experience from freshmen to seniors. The team consisted of Mina Dong, Kevin Kim, Emilio Rios-Rojas, Alanna Xu, and Caroline Wang with Brein Gross and Erin Thomas as our Team Leads and Matt Will as our Project Owner. The Sponsors we got to interact with were Jordan Denton, Director of Digital Shopper Innovation and Insights, and Sheryl Michael, Shopper and Market Insight, both of Proctor and Gamble. I really enjoyed working with the people in this team and it was sad to see the seniors go at the end of the semester.
We organized this information along with everything else we got from going through the process on an Elito Board to congregate our ideas. This information was used to build four personas that I worked on. Those being the Inexperienced Parent, the Experienced Parent, the Appeal focused Gifter, and the Practical Gifter.
We interviewed people who had recently had a baby shower or purchased from a registry to get an understanding of what they were thinking and feeling throughout the process. One interview I took notes on was very informative about why Gifters may not want to give diapers, their quote "I'm not going to be that person that buys three big packs of diapers" was very influential in our ideation moving forward as it showed that some Gifters view diapers as a low effort gift. I also got to lead an interview with a mom that gave us lots of useful info on the Creator side including what influences diaper brand decisions as well as other general information about having a registry.
During our ideation stage, I came up with an idea for a better visualization of the Diaper Fund to make it more appealing. The concept is similar to a board game that takes the user through the baby's growth in diaper sizes as it progresses with donations. The goal of this design was to present the Diaper Fund in a more appealing way as well as present more information such as the cost of keeping a baby in diapers, their sizing needs, and how many diapers a baby might need.
This was such a great experience and I learned so much from it, in large part due to the incredible team I was on. Everyone was so kind and hardworking, it felt like everyone did their fair share and then some and everyone was willing to help teach me things I didn't know or understand to do my best work. It was just such a great team dynamic where everyone was a friend, a committed teammate, and a great teacher.
The team's secondary research included a study provided to us by our sponsor Jordan, it informed us that 79% of Creators put diapers on their registry but 51% of Gifters purchase from outside of the registry. This motivated us to shift our focus to the Gifter side of this problem as the Creators already see the value in diapers.
Through our user testing we found that people liked the concept but it was a bit cluttered and messy which didn't make it very visually appealing. I iterated on this feedback with my final design by simplifying all the text and removing information that wasn't necessary. The exact number of diapers wasn't very important for Gifters but I included the amount of diapers needed per month in the description at the top to give them perspective on how many would be needed. It shows how much of each diaper size is needed visually with the size of the boxes. Finally, the dollar amount only goes up to $550 because that is what the current diaper fund goes up to and I didn't find one that was even half full when browsing other registries. I toyed with showing the cost of every diaper but that would make any donations seem negligible and discourage diaper gifting.
The PO, Matt, told me that I was very involved for a freshman so I believe I did a good job contributing to the project. I tried to be as involved as I could in every part of the process and I gained a lot from this experience because of that. I became much more familiar with several tools, processes, and concepts commonly used in UX design and got hands on experience in a lot of areas I may not otherwise have been able to such as leading interviews with strangers over Zoom. I went from feeling like a child thrown in the deep end of the pool to feeling like I could go through the design process myself to some degree of success. Of course, I still had a lot to learn, but this project provided very strong groundwork for me to build my skills off of.
We started with some Process Mapping to better understand the thought process and experience of buying from and creating a baby registry on Amazon. I created a registry on my own Amazon account to explore the creator side and gave my mother quite the fright in the process. I found that the creation process was rather lackluster, simply being a page with lots of boring black text on a boring grey background. A big feature to promote buying diapers is a "Diaper Fund" that allows Gifters to gift money to be put towards diapers. It seemed odd to me that this fund is only presented to Creators as a single line of text that can easily be skipped over with a check box that is unchecked by default. It’s very easy to not even enable the diaper fund or notice that it even exists. I also noticed that the fund didn't have any restrictions on what could be bought with the money so it acted as a regular Amazon gift card.