Case study

Creating a personalized mobile gift-giving experience for Sweetness

Identifying an opportunity

Sending baked gifts with an app can feel impersonal, and in the words of Sweetness' founder, the goal of Sweetness was:
"... to have a thoughtful experience, as if you were to go out there and buy a gift, package it yourself, and hand-deliver it to your recipient, yet you do this with the convenience of a mobile app with just a couple taps,”

- Sid Viswanathan, CEO

Creating a thoughtful experience

Our users were gift-givers of all types: coworkers, friends, family members. We wanted to create an app that someone of any level of technological proficiency could use, with the goal of making Sweetness the easiest way to send a personalized gift.

I was the sole designer on a three-person team, working alongside the CEO and CTO. I worked closely with the CEO to perform competitive analysis, and owned the design process from concept to final product.

I designed the app with iOS devices in mind (3GS and above), and created email templates for both giver and receiver, as well as an online scheduling tool that allowed the recipient to select a time and place that was most convenient for them to receive their gift.

Our process was pretty rapid, from initial competitive analysis and creation of user flows to rapid prototyping and development.

Reducing friction in app-based gift-giving

During our research phase, we learned that every other gift-giving app that we looked at required the gift giver to know the recipient’s full address, and even when sending perishable items, did not allow for a time to be scheduled for delivery.

We knew that apps like Square Cash allowed users to send something without needing to know detailed information about the recipient, so we solved this problem by following their lead. Instead of needing to know the recipient’s details, the giver would only need to know the recipient’s phone number or email address.

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