👩🏻💻Role
Lead product designer, conducting research, defining the experience, and collaborating with engineering and editorial.
Hi, I'm Kim Ku.
Currently designing products at Meta. See selected work or more about me.
Wirecutter: Holiday gift idea generator
Creating a discovery experience for curated gifts that helps shoppers find the right gift, whether they know where to start or not.
Problem
What is the optimal experience for gift buying that we can give to readers that will showcase Wirecutter-curated products?
Challenges
- We needed a better understanding of the shopping habits of our target users.
- We had to balance a short month-long timeline with useful features and scope it down to a manageable MVP.
Discovery
To start, a product manager and I conducted 6 interviews — 3 Wirecutter readers and 3 non-readers — to understand the problem we were trying to solve. Our questions followed this general flow:
- Frame how people shop for gifts currently and learn their likes and dislikes
- Dig into how they approach gifts for people that are hard to buy for
- Visit competitor sites, watch their usage, and identify points of friction
Learnings from the interviews
Shopping is taste-based
It'd be important for the gift recommendations and their presentation to feel curated and personal.
Effort and cost are very important
There was a direct correlation between the effort, cost, and time spent by a shopper and their relationship to their giftee.
Simplifying options is optimal
If a shopper knows the person they're buying for, they want to be able to target their interests against cost concurrently.
Everyone knows someone who's hard to shop for
If a shopper has no idea what to buy, how can we help them?
Wireframes and collaboration
Agreeing on the wireframes involved collaboration between the editorial, engineering, and product teams. Through wireframes, we were able to evolve the design experience and determine content hierarchy.
Given that this was an MVP feature, this was also where we made concessions on what was and wasn't possible.
Introducing the gift hub
The gift hub broke down into two distinct pages to help a shopper narrow down possible gift options.
For shoppers who know where to start
For people who knew who they were shopping for, they could dive into a specific interest. Our research showed that interests were how shoppers predominantly start their search.
For shoppers who need a hand
For people who want a guiding hand, the latter part of the page has curated campaigns, walking them through themes like "Secret Santa Gifts under $25."
Refining the right gift
Here you'll find gift recommendations curated by editors.
Filters to refine your search
You can further refine your search by interest, age, and price concurrently — a feature highly requested in our research.
Easy one-line product descriptions
Keeping the language short and simple was important for clarity.
Recirculation opportunities
If a gift recommendation was tied to another guide, we linked to it to keep shoppers in the vortex of gift content.
Learnings and lessons
- This was released as an MVP in November 2019 and we continued optimizing and observing it in the wild.
- In the future, we could expand gift recommendations to other holidays beyond December.
- This could also evolve into a personalized gifting service that our editors curate for you.