Elevating the awareness of infant essentials through design recommendations and user testing.
Project Duration:
4 months (January 2022 - April 2022)
Team Members:
8 UX Designers
Areas of Focus:
Prototyping, User Research
Personal Contributions:
Creation of high fidelity screens & user insights
P&G wants to increase the ease and awareness of adding and gifting essentials like diapers to the Amazon baby registry and increase the desire and emotional appeal to gift these necessities to new parents. The current Amazon baby registry interface emphasizes fun gifts such as strollers and baby clothes with less emphasis on essentials. This space includes the perspectives of Registry Creators and Registry Gifters.
Our goal for this project was to uncover insights and UX recommendations to improve the Amazon Baby Registry experience for both registry Creators and Gifters to make diapers a more integral part of the gifting experience by offering design suggestions that create opportunities for practical/emotional appeal around purchasing necessities.
How are Gifters currently engaging with baby registries?
To understand the landscape of baby registries, and more importantly, its role in the lives of our users, we sought to understand the emotions and mindsets of our users through the lens of the Gifter as well as how they interact with the current Amazon Baby Registry.Our team performed a content audit on the current process of using the Amazon Baby Registry as a Gifter using the platform. Walking through this portion of the experience gave us a more solid understanding of the interactions that users experience on the Amazon platform.
Process Mapping
For the purposes of this project, we identified Stage 3 as providing the greatest design opportunities to affect user behaviors since most decisions on item selection happen during this stage.
From these insights generated from our primary and secondary research, we aimed to design for opportunities and gaps identified. To recap, the areas with the greatest opportunities for improving the overall Amazon registry experience and for making diapers a more integral part of that experience are:
For each of the following concepts, we ideated and iterated on concepts through a process of sketching, high-fidelity, concept testing, and iteration. We moved into high-fidelity very quickly since we were creating smaller interactions that could be directly implemented into Amazon's current interface. This also provided us with cleaner prototypes with which to test participants.
Perhaps the biggest finding that we focused most of our efforts on through this project was making diapers an integral part of the Gifting experience. We discovered that most creators see the value of diapers and add them to their registries but gifters do not purchase them. The biggest challenge facing this goal is that Gifters think that diapers are a low-effort gift with no lasting permanence. We set out to ideate how the platform could combat that.
Amazon does not have an option for Creators to attach notes to their items for the Gifters to see, while other baby registry sites such as Target and Babylist have this feature. Our concept intends to bridge the gap between Creator needs and Gifter browsing, allowing the Creator to establish a more personal or emotional connection if they wish and highlight priority items. This could encourage appeal-focused Gifters to purchase practical items since it portrays diapers as having more of a lasting permanence.
Our participants really liked this feature for its personal feel and focus on the relationship between Gifter and Creator.
Overall this concept earned a 5.0 out 5 in terms of Likelihood of Use. It was also the most liked concept of the five tested, earning the highest average of 4.3 out of 5.
Most participants (7 out of 8) assumed that this concept would encourage them to buy more diapers, however, the testing did not involve adequate situational testing in this area to make any stronger conclusions.
Since our participants really liked this idea, we did not make any further iterations on this concept and instead focused our iterative efforts on the other concepts shown in this document.
One of the most prevalent worries that we found in users is being paranoid about whether or not another person buying off of the registry is going to buy the same item. To combat this issue, we wanted to create a page-hit feature that will give the users insight into which items have been purchased and items that have yet to be bought.
To address the problem of concern over buying duplicate items, we wanted to implement an easier way for Gifters to see what other Gifters on the registry were doing. Amazon does not have a feature within their baby registry that shows which parts of the page and/or categories are being visited, so we took the liberty of creating one. This feature would show analytics of what other Gifters are purchasing from the registry. During our interviews, Gifters were worried about buying duplicate items, so this could be one way to alleviate these fears.
In our first iteration, we decided to use the visualization of bars to help users identify which categories of items need to be bought, and which categories are being bought from the most.
While most participants liked this concept, they felt it was still a little ambiguous and needed a more digestible visualization.Overall this concept earned a 4.5 out of 5 in terms of Likelihood of Use.
While some participants (4) expected to see how many diapers would be bought with the amount of money in the fund, 3 participants expected to see how many diapers had already been purchased from the registry, and one participant wanted to see both.
Most participants (7) either agreed or strongly agreed that this concept could encourage them to buy more diapers (further testing required).
To alleviate some of the issues that our survey participants found, we decided to add color coding to the bars to make them stand out more. The bars in red indicate that little to no items are being bought in that category, while green bars represent that users of almost all the items in that category are bought. If appeal-focused Gifters see that the items they like to buy are already purchased, it could motivate them to look at other categories and buy from there instead.
Above the categories that are frequently purchased, there is a note that says “People are buying from these categories the most
”Above the categories that aren’t being frequently purchased, there is a message saying “These categories need a little love”
One of the issues we’ve identified with Amazon’s baby registry is that users find Amazon’s user interface confusing and overwhelming in many ways. To give users a better experience of navigating the user interface, we implemented a shopping assistant feature, better filter options, Creator noteboards, and a visualization of the diaper fund.
Currently, Amazon only has only three filters: Must have, Purchased, and Still Needed, as well as a way to sort from price low-high or high-low. Through our competitive analysis, we found that other baby registries such as Target have a wider variety of filters to help Gifters find a suitable gift. In our prototype shown above, we ideated some different types of filters inspired by target’s UI as well as our proto-personas.
Participants liked the added labels to help guide them through the registry, and in particular were drawn to the Most Needed and Pricing categories
Overall, this concept earned a 4.1 out of 5 in terms of Likelihood of Use.
Participants were either indifferent towards this concept or agreed/strongly agreed that it would encourage them to buy more diapers (further testing needed).
Since our design was well received, we kept it mostly the same. The only thing that we changed was reword the “practical picks” button to “always loved” at the suggestion of our sponsor to add more emotional appeal.
While Creators were not the user group we chose to target they are not an unimportant part of the diaper-gifting process so we explored their perspective as well. We chose to walk through their process to create a process map, and complete a competitive analysis against Target and Baby List.
For registry Creators, their main goal is to sift through all the baby care items available on Amazon and choose a selection of items that can meet all of their needs at a high-quality. To do this, they need to engage in research to decide which items are worth adding to the registry and which can be disregarded. The timeline below depicts this process as determined by our content audit.
For the purposes of this project, we identified Stages 1, 2, and 3 as providing the greatest design opportunities to affect user behaviors.
We identified stage one as important to the Creator process because this is where people decide if they’re even going to use Amazon’s registry. However, we did not identify any design opportunities within this stage.
We identified stage two as important to the Creator process because this is where Creators set up their registry and become familiar with the user interface and what the site has to offer. This is the Creator’s first impression of the site.
Additionally, the option to set up a Diaper Fund was a simple line of text with a gray checkbox, meaning it’s:
Target’s baby registry creation is only slightly more colorful but it makes it feel much more welcoming. Target’s onboarding process is arranged in short, easily digestible steps.
We identified stage three as important to the Creator process because this is where Creators decide what items they want to add and prioritize on their baby registry.
The registry checklist was organized into understandable categories. But within those categories, products were displayed in an overwhelming & disorganized way:
Target offers the ability to sort by diaper brand along with several other filtering options.
From our research, we found that sometimes registry Creators are not aware of how many diapers will be used by their newborn. Because of this, parents tend to not put as many diapers on the registry as they actually need. We thought that informing Creators about these statistics in a visual way could encourage them to make a Diaper Fund and as a result lead Gifters to purchase more diapers.
Based on our competitive analysis and frustrations our sponsor shared with us, we discovered that Amazon’s UI is cluttered and overwhelming to parents. In our hi-fi, we added multiple ways for Creators to sort and filter results so they can easily find what they need. These filters include brand, price, size, and type. The Size filter also included the approximate weight of the baby wearing that size (this is a feature that Target has), as well as the type of diaper (such as organic or swimmable diapers).
In the duration of this project, we were limited in our designs and research insights by our time constraints. We acknowledge that this is a complex problem space concerning multiple user groups and stakeholders along with their varying behaviors and expectations. For the purposes of this project and our deliverables, we explored the landscape of baby registries briefly, but identified the space for the most impactful opportunities for design to be shifting the perspective on diapers and necessities on the Gifter side.
If we had more time, we would also explore the Creator's perspective regarding diapers and registries. From our research, we found that expecting parents are recognizing the value of and adding diapers to registries. However, a possible avenue of further exploration would be to identify the behaviors in this diaper-adding behavior, and the influencing factors surrounding this interaction.
Furthermore, the designs stemming from our identified gaps and opportunities are informed by generative and evaluative user research. However, due to the amount of time dedicated to initial space exploration and research, we had limited time to conduct further research on our final high-fidelity prototypes in context with our user group. Our team suggests conducting evaluations on these designs with the primary user group of Gifters, ideally in both a qualitative format, as well as quantitative approaches. Qualitative approaches could include usability testing, bodystorming, scenario testing, etc. in order to understand how users interact with these designs and identify areas of improvement. Quantitative approaches can be used to compare multiple features or our designs against competing platforms (A/B testing, ROI, surveys, etc.).
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