Sammie’s is the brainchild of Samantha Resse who wants to provide young entrepreneurs the opportunity to franchise and open their online sub-shops for less than $50,000, instead of the $1,000,000 average brick-and-mortar franchise costs.
Sammie's was divided up into teams which each had a focus area: This study focuses on the 'gift card' portion of it- primarily allowing a user (Jennifer) to order gift cards for friends via three different methods of delivery.
The first task was to look at the "big picture" of a business, trying to think of as many aspects that fit into the larger categories as we could.
We utilized Whimsical to create this flow chart of the various elements that would help us to learn more about the start-up and help to find areas that might need some special focus as we started to design.
The next step was to analyze potential competitors in order to get a sense of what they were doing for our designated design area - in this case, gift cards.
We looked at what was effective in their designs, what we could do better, and weaknesses for each site looked at before compiling our findings and presenting them.
Once we had a rough understanding of how we should approach our design aspects, we started creating paper prototypes and testing them to get some early feedback and see how the app would be structured.
After the creation of the paper prototype to plot out the basic flow of the app and it's structure, we starting building an interactive wireframe,
which we then tested with passerby to see how the general populace would interact with it and to pinpoint any issues there may be.
Since these tests were not recorded for the tester's privacy, the video below is a recreation of of some of the actions noticed during the testing phase.
After gathering feedback from the testers, changes were implemented into the final stage of the design build using Figma to create a modern looking, realistically functioning app.
The ultimate goal is to make it easy and satisfying to use this version to order gift cards, and that is demonstrated here.