Wish’em - A birthday reminder application (UI/UX)
01 PROBLEM
Problem statement
Recently I forgot to wish my friend on his birthday and worse, I called him for a few bucks as I was empty. Result was a pretty disappointing awkward moment there. We often forget our dearest one’s birthday in the busy life, still we expect our close ones to remember it. Just a wish would make their day a little better. I had the birthdays saved in the google calendar and it usually works. But I guess it doesn’t work anymore, so I checked out other options and found a very poor interfaced app with 5 Million downloads. And I couldn’t quite use it well. Being my first UI/UX project, I didn’t want to spend my time on a concept project; Rather I decided to work on a real project and publish it to get feedbacks on my design. So myself and Hariharan Sivakumar took this as our first real project, where I own the design and he owns the development.
Objective
Create a smartphone application to remind about birthdays with outstanding user interface and experience.
Analysis
Existing app reviews
Existing applications failed at their basic use case, which is to remind birthdays. Most of them lacked consistency and as loaded with so much ads after every action; which makes the application unusable. Some users also reported sudden data loss of their birthday entries.
Competitive analysis
By narrowing down the reviews the following pain points are concluded.
Frequent full screen ads.
User interface is very modest.
Notifications(reminders) are inconsistent.
Accidental data loss.
Can’t sync with existing birthdays on contacts.
User persona
02 STRATEGY
Findings
Being reminder application users doesn’t use the app often, so they are frustrated on seeing ads when they do.
Listing of the birthdays needs to be attractive and pleasing to the user.
Notifications should be consistent, so reminding few days before the actual day will help the user in case of technical faults.
Option for the user to backup their birthday entries would be handy.
Pick the contacts and read for existing birthday entries when user sign up.
Most users requested gift suggestion and wish phrases as new feature.
Outcome
As users were looking for a new feature to suggest gifts, it can be used to generate revenue rather than using ads. An affiliate program to suggest gifts based on individuals age, interest and gender would make revenue for the app.
An Import/Export option could help a user to backup his own data and also share it with other users. But as Facebook met privacy concerns on sharing people’s birthday without their consent, it has to be limited by encrypting the file so that only app users could access it.
As gift suggestion is already a new feature, notifying the user 10 days before the actual birthday would help them buy gifts and it would have enough time to reach them when they order online. While it also gives a chance to the app to notify twice about one birthday, reducing the chance of missing the notification.
Get the google contacts on signing up to make a list of existing birthdays from their contact list.
03 SCOPE
User stories
Scopes
Collect interest from user for gift suggestion feature with affiliate links.
Design a specific page that would standout from the app for listing birthdays.
Sync google contacts and retrieve existing birthdays.
Custom gift notification option to notify user few days before the actual birthday.
Star signs for individuals based on their birth dates.
Wish phrases on the birthday page.List down generic interest to fetch item through affiliate.
04 STRUCTURE
Sitemap
Layouts
Sign in
Add birthday(home)
Upcoming events
Settings
Missing birthdays
Birthday entries
Import/Export
05 SKELETON
Wireframes
06 SURFACE
Colors
Color of choice was important to add appropriate support to the application’s design language. The main goal of the app is to provide a pleasant UI and rich user experience, so a color which radiates luxury and minimalism with dark shades was the choice. Which lead to a dark shade of Bossa nova.
Fonts
To keep people familiar with the texts, regular open sans and a modern font to spice things up were filtered to match the design language.
Design Elements
Mockups
Impact
We launched our app after 6 months of learning and intense development. I am really lucky to see my first design in action as a designer. Thanks to Hariharan Sivakumar for bearing me throughout the process. Being a newbie in app development we really didn't know much about launching an app. But surprisingly after a brief post about our work on Reddit; the community gave a huge spotlight and I got many number feedbacks and learned a lot in a short period of time. Since then our application kept rising in downloads without marketing. We are also happy to state that more than 80% of our current users are organic users; Hurray 🥰🎉
Stats
