GIFTWELL
Project Type
Mobile App
Discipline
UX Research · UI Design · Branding
Project Overview
GiftWell is a mobile application designed to make group gifting joyful and effortless. The app allows friend groups to create gifting events, collectively vote on the best gift option, and split costs, all within a single, intuitive flow.
The project spans the full design lifecycle: from identifying a real user pain point, through research and ideation, to wireframing, visual design, brand identity, and high-fidelity prototyping. The result is a product that transforms a typically stressful coordination process into a delightful shared experience.
This project was developed during the Shillington Graphic Design course in 2025.
Defining the Challenge
The experience of organizing a group gift one is almost universally frustrating. Even though group gifting for birthdays, graduations, and weddings is common, there is no dedicated, seamless platform that handles the full arc of the group gifting experience.
User Pain Points
Through early research conversations and observations, three core user frustrations emerged repeatedly:
· Users are overwhelmed by too many choices.
· Users struggle with the coordination overhead of managing multiple people.
· Users feel dissatisfied with the impersonal outcomes that result from the lack of a proper process.
Design Opportunity
The opportunity was to create a product that wraps the entire group gifting journey in a single and seamless experience.
The Flow
The GiftWell core flow follows a linear, four-stage progression with one intentional decision point and one undo escape hatch:
1. Join Group — The user receives an invitation to join a gifting group for a specific event. The user decides whether to participate. If they decline, the flow loops back to the group screen. If they accept, they proceed.
2. Gift Selection — The user is presented with a curated list of gift options, each with an image, description, and per-person cost.
3. Vote on Option — The user selects their preferred gift. The interface supports single selection with a clear visual active state (highlight + star icon). An 'Undo' option is available for users who change their mind.
4. Confirm Vote — The user confirms their selection. Upon confirmation, they receive a full-screen 'Thank You' animation, and are then directed to the results screen.
Flow Design Decisions
Several deliberate design decisions shaped this flow:
· Linear progression: Users cannot skip steps or make out-of-order decisions. This removes decision paralysis.
· Emotional payoff: After submitting a vote, users see a brief full-screen 'Thank you for your vote' screen. This acknowledges the user's contribution and creates a moment of satisfaction.
· Undo as trust-builder: The 'Undo' branch at the voting step was added based on the principle that users should always feel in control. Irreversible actions create anxiety; the ability to reconsider creates confidence.
· Positive reinforcement: The final state uses positive reinforcement language, echoing the celebratory brand voice.
Emotional Journey
Four emoji states were mapped to the major flow stages to ensure the design arc moved the user from uncertainty toward delight:
· Join Group: 😔 Uncertain / FOMO — the user may not know what to do
· Gift Selection: 😮 Surprised / Engaged — the quality of options creates positive surprise
· Vote Confirmed: 😌 Relieved / Satisfied — the act of deciding brings closure
· Result: 🤩 Delighted / Excited — knowing the outcome and contributing to it creates joy
The Wireframe
Low-fidelity wireframes were created to validate the core UX logic of the voting flow. The wireframes focused on information hierarchy, interaction states, and the key screens in the participant journey.
Wireframe Validation Insights
· The single-select interaction model was validated as sufficient. Users did not need multi-vote capability for this use case.
· Avatar display on the results screen (showing who voted for each option) was seen as a social proof mechanism that builds group accountability.
The Result
The final high-fidelity UI applies the full GiftWell visual language to the wireframed flow. Each screen combines functional clarity with brand expressiveness.
Gift Voting Screen — Unselected State
Gift options are displayed as cards in a scrollable list. Each card shows a gift photo, name, brief description, per-person cost, and total cost.
Gift Voting Screen — Selected State
The Submit button simultaneously activates (changing from gray to a vivid purple), signaling readiness to proceed. The contrast between the de-emphasized and active states is intentional and high-contrast, ensuring clarity for all users.
Thank You Screen
The post-vote screen is a full-bleed celebration. The 'Change your mind? There's still time!' escape link sits below, styled as a text link rather than a button.
Results Screen
The results screen reveals the group's decision. The primary CTA 'Contribute to gift' is the logical next action, converting the group's shared decision into a collective payment.
Home Screen
Event cards use the illustration system to generate unique visual identities per event. Each card is a different color combination of the brand palette with a distinct arrangement of abstract shapes. The countdown badges creates gentle urgency without being anxiety-inducing.
Key UX Learnings
This project reinforced several core UX principles through applied design:
· Structuring a decision (voting from a curated list) is often more effective than enabling open-ended input. Constraints reduce cognitive load.
· Price transparency in social payment contexts is a primary trust signal. Hiding costs creates hesitation.
· In consumer social products, the visual and emotional design is as important as the functional design.
· Brand is not just a layer applied on top of UX. The illustration system, color palette, and copy voice all reinforce the product's core value proposition.
Future Directions
If developed further, GiftWell's next features would include:
· An integrated payment flow.
· A gift recommendation engine that surfaces suggestions based on the recipient's interests.
· A group chat feature for post-vote coordination.
· Recipient experience: a 'reveal' screen for the gift recipient when the gift is confirmed.
· API integrations with gifting retailers to enable direct purchase within the app.
The Brand
GiftWell needed a brand identity that could carry the emotional weight of the product. The brand needed to feel simultaneously energetic and trustworthy, playful but not childish, celebratory but accessible.
Logo Design
Multiple logo directions were explored, ranging from clean sans-serif wordmarks in various weights and cases (uppercase, lowercase, mixed) to a final chosen direction: a bold, mixed-weight & font wordmark that emulates the diversity in friend groups. The final logo emulates the feeling of joy when friends come together to celebrate their friendship. The stacked two-line layout ('Gift / Well') creates a stable, iconic shape that works well across app icon, billboard, and notification badge contexts.
The Concept
The central design metaphor powering GiftWell is the handwrapped gift. This concept guided every design decision, from the visual language to the interaction model.
Wrapping a gift by hand is intentional, personal, and visible in its effort. GiftWell was designed to embody that same quality: every step of the user experience is crafted to feel deliberate and warm, not transactional.
How This Manifests in Design
· The brand identity uses hand-drawn-feeling typography and an exuberant, confetti-like system of illustrated shapes evoking gift wrap, bows, ribbons, and celebration.
· The color palette is intentionally bold and joyful to reflect the celebratory mood of a gift-giving event.
· Playful micro-interactions (like the 'Thank you for your vote' full-screen animation) are designed as emotional beats that reward user actions.
· The UX flow is tightly sequenced so that the 'weight' of coordination is invisible to participants. They simply receive an invitation, vote, and contribute.
App Icon
The app icon takes the 'GW' letterforms from the logo and places them on a bold red background. The result is immediately recognizable in a phone's home screen dock. The icon was tested in a real iPhone dock environment to validate its visual strength at small sizes.
Color System
The GiftWell color palette was built for maximum expressiveness and flexibility. Rather than a single hero color, the brand uses a full spectrum of vivid, saturated hues applied across UI surfaces, illustrations, and marketing materials,
Illustration System
A custom illustration system of abstract confetti-like shapes (stars, blobs, crowns, splats, arrows, and bows) forms the visual backbone of GiftWell's brand world. These shapes are drawn in a deliberately imperfect, organic style, referencing the handcrafted quality of gift wrapping. The shapes appear in event card backgrounds, onboarding screens, marketing posters, and physical brand applications like gift wrap and stickers.
This system gives the brand an enormous amount of flexibility: any combination of shapes and colors can be assembled into a fresh composition, ensuring that no two event cards look exactly the same, which mirrors the uniqueness of each gifting occasion.
Photo Treatment
GiftWell photography features groups of friends in joyful, celebratory moments. Brand shapes from the GiftWell illustration system are interspersed directly onto the photograph, placed at the edges and corners of the frame to feel like a natural part of the scene.
Brand Applications
A strong product brand extends beyond the app itself. GiftWell's identity was applied to multiple real-world and digital touchpoints to demonstrate the brand's flexibility and depth.
Physical: Gift Wrap & Sticker Sheets
Physical objects reinforce the 'handwrapped gifts' concept that drives the brand, and could serve as both a marketing tool and a premium product feature. The illustration system was applied to physical gift wrapping paper. This is both a brand extension and a conceptual loop: GiftWell, the app about gifting, produces actual gift wrap. A companion sticker sheet was designed with 'To: / From:' label stickers featuring the GiftWell brand mark and illustration system.
Out-of-Home Advertising
A three-panel outdoor advertising mockup was created to demonstrate the brand's visual impact at scale. The campaign uses three complementary panels: one message panel, one photography panel featuring the target demographic, and one logo/CTA panel with app store download links. The three-panel format creates a billboard-scale brand statement that communicates the product's social nature immediately.
Push Notifications as Brand Voice
The notification is a brand touchpoint that appears on the user's lock screen, where most brands use generic, functional language. GiftWell's playful copy transforms a routine notification into a moment of brand personality.
Outcomes & Key Learnings
GiftWell outcomes can be summarized into four points:
· Reduces group gifting coordination from days of back-and-forth messaging to a single timed voting event.
· Removes the social awkwardness of money conversations through transparent, upfront cost display.
· Creates a product experience that matches the emotional register of its use case: joyful, social, celebratory.
· Builds a brand identity that is immediately distinctive and ownable in a market full of generic-looking social apps.
matheusmonteiro.designer@gmail.com
Washington DC, USA