Research

One of the newest features launched during the pandemic was curated gift lists for unique personalities, such as “the Video Call Coordinator”, “the Parent-Turned-Music-Producer” and the “PJ all-day hobbyist”, for example. However the personality Gift Lists performed poorly in terms of engagement and conversion rate. We conducted user interviews to determine what the friction points were, and it came down to confusion around the list names and the product assortment relevancy.

Competitor Research

The Holiday Gift Fuide working group and the research team also collected many examples of various gift finders from other e-comm sites and publications. We discussed various options and the team narrowed it down to 3 Big Ideas with the most potential.

Brainstorming concepts

The ideas for an interactive gift-finder ranged from a gift factory with knobs and levers that could be adjusted to return a custom product array, to a gifting assistant that asks you questions about the recipient to narrow down the options, and finally a smart board where you can create “buckets” for each recipient, pin ideas and more.

The team reached a consensus that the "Macy's Little Helper" concept showed the greatest promise for further development. This idea builds upon the personality lists created during the previous year's efforts. However, the new approach aims to present the information in a more coherent and user-friendly manner, ensuring that users receive relevant and easily understandable results.

Back-end logic: Interest-based gift ideas

The Gift Finder experience would allow the customer to answer a few questions about the recipient and this would slowly reduce the full product assortment to the most relevant to the customer.

Macy’s usually selects up to 2000 products to feature as holiday gift ideas. What 3 questions can we ask about the recipient to determine the most relevant gifts?

We chose 3 questions to help narrow down the products.

1. What is the recipients approach to gifts?

2. What are they interested in?

3. What is their age range?

Question 1

We decided that the best way to narrow down the results is to start by grouping the products according to the gifting mindset of the recipient:

1. Appreciates any thoughtful gift

2. Prefers familiar, practical gifts

3. Excited by new, trendy gifts

4. Values high-quality, luxury gifts

Results: Only products tagged with the selected mindset, “trendy gifts” in this case, will be visible.

Question 2

Referring back to the user interviews, it was clear choosing a gift by the recipients interests or personality type is a common step in the gift hunt.

So the second question lists interest categories and sub-categories for the user to select. For the sake of simplicity, theQuestion 2 wireframe only focuses on the 6 main category suggestions that correlate to Macy’s products:

1. Creative

2. Outdoor

3. Social

4. Brainy

5. Sports

6. Fashion

Question 3

Another attribute that would greatly narrow down gift ideas to the most relevant would be age group.

Other suggested filters were price and the relationship such as boss, teacher or pet sitter, but this was beyond the scope and we decided to stick to just interests.

Hi-fidelity Wireframe

This is an example of the high-fidelity wireframe we provided the designer’s with.

The filters will allow users change the price point to suit their needs.

Solution: Integrating the quiz into the main landing page

Due to the thousands of products in the gift guide, we presented the customer with interest-based gift lists as well as the interactive quiz which would take them to the dedicated interactive gift finder pool.

The Gift Lists were based on established Macy’s ‘Personas’, and translated into interest categories, i.e. The Fitness Pro, The Social Influencer, The Homebody, etc. This saved us time because the tagging by interest was already finished.

Performance Data Analysis
(Post-Mortem)

After holiday, we analyzed the performance data for the Gift Finder as well as the entire gift guide page. The findings and recommendations are compiled in a final deck for Senior Leadership’s review.

Due to the special circumstances during the pandemic. It was clear shopping behavior would be different than previous years. I was curious to compare the Covid case trend data to account for any anomalies from the previous year’s KPIs.

Findings:

Revenue per Visit (RPV) increased over the course of the 2020 holiday season but experiencd a decline in 2021. In fact, we found an inverse relationship between Covid cases and RPV in 2020 vs 2021. When Covid cases continued to decrease leading into and over the course of the season, RPV steadily rose. When cases increased, RPV fell. However, people were shopping earlier and spending more in 2021 due to financial relief and so the Gift Guide generated more income than 2020.

Holiday Gift Finder

(final Landing Page design)