Zazzle’s mission is to become a truly creative company that supports its users’ creativity on its platform. There is no single identifiable problem with creativity. Every person is capable of creative expression but differ in their medium, process, output, etc. We dived into extensive research to discover an opportunity among user pain-points and turn that around to Zazzle’s success.
Zazzle’s mission is to become a truly creative company that supports its users’ creativity on its platform. There is no single identifiable problem with creativity. Every person is capable of creative expression but differ in their medium, process, output, etc. We dived into extensive research to discover an opportunity among user pain-points and turn that around to Zazzle’s success.
The universe of the creative space is so ambiguous and vague that this was a crucial first phase into determining the scope of the project. It was difficult to know what we don’t know but we utilized various methods to help us better understand the space. This set the foundation of the future phases of converging and diverging.
-“I don’t want my past efforts to go to waste.”
-“I think the cost of creativity is high.”
-“I experiment in my process to move forward”
-How might we encourage interaction with non-monetary value?
-How might we facilitate collaboration between strangers?
An extensive research to study and understand the space of creativity taught the Zoolanders many things about inspiration, collaboration, user needs, and more. After rapid exploration through different methods, the team discovered important themes and then derived hypotheses, which led design research activities to learn more specific things and validate assumptions. Overall, research insights and findings proved to be crucial to ideate for potential solutions and Zoolander came up with three bold futures for Zazzle. We continued to research into areas that were important to us.
After covering the first half of the design process, the team was tasked to narrow down on a specific direction that can have most impact to help Zazzle achieve their goal. After learning so much creativity and coming up with potential futures, Zoolanders needed to dig deeper into these futures, understand the need behind the values and select a final direction to design and develop.
-Communities built on stories
-Tools to enhance collaboration
-A space to represent sub-communities
-Allowing people to connect with gifts more profoundly
-Collaborative spaces built on bonds
-Spontaneous collaboration to strengthen existing relationships
After much consideration in terms of benefits to user and Zazzle, trade-offs compared to other directions, the team decided to go ahead with focusing on making the gifting experience a memorable one. Users care about making memories with their loved ones and doing that through gifts was a solution that most users showed the need for. It took two rounds of storyboarding and speed-dating and a deep dive analysis of top 3 potential ideas through rose-bud-thorn activity, the team arrived at a final direction that would take up to design and develop in detail in order to deliver a solid solution at the end of the project.
With a direction set in place, Zoolanders were tasked to explore the flow of the new solution. We needed to sketch out the details and start developing a user flow. At this point, we enter another phase within the second phase of design process that requires different design explorations, based on our research findings, to deliver a fully functional prototype concept in the end. There also lies opportunity to reframe the idea, catering the same needs but delivering different solution.
“[I think the most challenging aspect of] creativity is to figure out what that ’something’ is. It is sometimes too vague to turn into a concrete artifact.”
The paralyzing effect one feels when attempting to produce something beginning from an empty slate
As we develop our solution, client feedback was crucial to make a decision and move forward. The gifting experience appeared to be too narrow and specific in imparting value to the entire Zazzle platform. Hence, we reframed to move away from the gifting experience and focus more on brainstorming phase of creation process with similar solution of memorable experiences. We mapped out the user journey for the initial final direction in order to understand points of the journey where we can design to make an impact. With a quantitative survey showing that brainstorming was the most difficult phase for users and then reframing to a more broader goal of assisting users in the creation process, we finalize the direction of using experiences to assist users in brainstorming phase.
With a solid anchoring of our final direction, the time came to start sketching more details of the user flow. At this point, we use a solution of system of activities that help users brainstorm for their creations. Please refer to the prototype page to learn more about the design decisions. A main focus of the design phase is the iterative nature where we constantly test to improve our design. This section takes us through the testing phase of our process.
“[I think the most challenging aspect of] creativity is to figure out what that ’something’ is. It is sometimes too vague to turn into a concrete artifact.”
The paralyzing effect one feels when attempting to produce something beginning from an empty slate
We tested the flows of our activities using usability testing with think aloud protocol, the findings from the testing session gave us crucial insights into improving the user flow and make it more useful and usable for the user. With this marking the final research rounds of our design process, we explore integration of our new solution into Zazzle’s platform. See our final solution here.
For the last 5 months of the MHCI program, Team Zoolander carried out the remainder of the capstone project remotely. As a result, the team had to experiment with alternatives for conducting research and managing communication. Learn more about how the team was able to navigate the unexpected challenge, and come out of it triumphant (and healthy.)
In the end, a vision without the ability to execute it is probably a hallucination.
In the end, a vision without the ability to execute it is probably a hallucination.
In the end, a vision without the ability to execute it is probably a hallucination.
In the end, a vision without the ability to execute it is probably a hallucination.
