Flipper

UX / PRODUCT DESIGN LEAD

2018

Flipper is a gift finding tool that was built as part of Penguin’s Christmas Campaign.

Despite being a small project, creating this website had quite a significant impact in terms of learnings and it contributed greatly to other projects I was involved in as it was the first product we’ve brought to life by following Google’s Design Sprint Methodology at Penguin Random House. Being the publisher of The Sprint Book, the business had an understanding of the value of this methodology which made it easier to gain buy in from the stakeholders.

Goal

Flipper's key user journey

As the UX Lead on this project, during the Design Sprint week I helped stimulating the creativity, captured what was being discussed as a user journey map on the whiteboard, mashed the best bits of the emerging ideas and turned them into a prototype as the facilitator coordinated the discussion.

Create a playful gift recommendation tool for Christmas Campaign.

Pre-sprint

Pre-research (which was a combination of interviews with the stakeholders, user surveys and the interpretation of the analytics we’ve had at the time) has shown that:

15 million Penguin Random House books bought as gifts in 2015 (worth £110m to the business).
48% of shoppers now buy all their Christmas gifts online
The average time spent on searching online for Christmas presents is 13 hours
BUT there is a steady decline in people giving books as gifts
According to a recent Bookmarks panel survey, just over half of readers will pay more for a book if it is a gift.
Interests of the recipient and the gifter’s own taste are the main triggers in choosing books as gifts. Buying a book is a reflection on the gifter’s taste or thoughtfulness

Design

As part of the Design Sprint we’ve run a Crazy Eights exercise which is a great way of generating new ideas. We’ve asked everyone, including participating stakeholders to sketch 8 solutions in 8 minutes based on the “How Might We Questions” we’ve posed and the competitor’s examples we’ve looked at earlier.

Sketching stages

It was during this process I came up with the idea of designing a very minimalistic yet playful interface which would consist of horizontally scrollable sections for the selection of the gift receiver’s age and their tastes / likes.

In addition to this I thought the experience could benefit from the playfulness of the dating apps so it could present the books as a stack of cards which could be swiped right if the users are interested and left if they are not.

Prototype

While the other participants worked on copy and collecting images and other content, I’ve put together the wireframes based on the user journey map that we have agreed on.

For the first iteration of the prototype I used Flinto which enabled me to build a prototype rapidly that is realistic enough. But then moved onto using Principle for the following iterations as the ability to use symbols has really streamlined my process.

Usability test

After a brief interview for understanding the participating users’ online behaviour they were asked to complete the task of finding books as gifts for their loved ones. The key issues that were observed were as below:

As much as users were positively receptive to the idea of a playful experience, dating app concept did not resonate with them.
It was also observed that the users didn’t like not being able to see the books they swiped right (interested) until they go through the whole stack.

Based on my analysis of the usability test, I've prepared another prototype addressing the issues I've identified on the first one and conducted another usability test to see if there are any other major issues left before handing over to the developers.

On the first week of its launch, Flipper has been used 11k times to find gifts which provided an extra boost for our book sales during the Christmas period of 2016.