Our client discovered a market devoid of an easy, digital avenue of group gift-giving. Sure, we have group fundraising apps and store registeries, but there wasn’t an easy way to say “Hey, I really think so-and-so would like this. Who wants to help contribute to this gift?” That is exactly what motivated the entrepreneurial endeavor of the Thoughtful Pinch App, a social app that encourages and fosters the gift of giving small tokens of kindness. Thoughtful Pinch invites the user to post a small gift to someone they care about and encourages others to monetarily contribute to that gift. Once the gift goal is reached, the receiver can redeem the gift and the cycle continues.

We met with the client when they had rudimentary visual and functionality guidelines. Ideas were raw and the client was still immersed in the discovery phase, so we were promptly brought on during the early stages of ideation. Utilizing our expertise in Full Lifecycle Product Design, our challenge was to work within an existing brand, define our audience and design a product that adhered to business goals and advocated for the user. Challenge accepted.

1. Discovery

DEFINING THE AUDIENCE 

Who will use this product? What will they expect? How can we cater to their needs? These are some of the questions that helped us define our target market. We spent hours and hours understanding the “social” user, but our epiphany finally came when we figured out that we were designing a product for the “emotional" user. Unlike products and apps that are created for practical use, our product would be used emotionally. We realized our audience wanted to interact with an “experience”, feel good about contributing and be publically patted-on-the-back for their good deeds. And because our audience was the emotional user, social media would be the platform we would use to leverage FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).  

USER SCENARIOS 

One of the obstacles we faced was determining how a user would navigate the App coming from a social link. Social platforms like Facebook were very restrictive with API useage and integration. We worked through many iterations of user scenarios and ultimately defined three ways of user entry into the app. 1) Direct  2) Facebook link with app downloaded 3) Facebook link without app downloaded. However, we still faced the challenge of entry #3. How were we going to direct the user to a specific app landing page when coming from a Facebook link without the app downloaded? We resolved this during the "concepting stage" below.

SUPPORTING THE BRAND 

Our client had authored numerous blog posts under the blog name “Thoughful Pinch" about the idea of small gift-giving. This was before they decided that they wanted to turn their idea in an app. Since their audience already was familiar with their blog and brand, we decided to use their existing brand identity. However, their brand was not optimized for product use, especially on small screens like a mobile phone. Therefore, we enhanced their brand to adhere to mobile standards. We also created a color pallet that could be universally used.

Software used: Adobe Illustrator