Lottay is an online gifting site with a twist. What separates Lottay from the pack is that you can wish for anything—from a cup of coffee to a trip to Europe. They can do this because what you’re receiving in the end isn’t the actual physical gift, but the money friends and family have donated to fund it! Lottay is able to facilitate all of this via a PayPal checkout process.

The Lottay team contacted me to help bring their site to the next level and to do it fast!  Using their existing look and feel, the first task at hand was to design a homepage that made sense to the user and that answered basic questions like: “What is this?” “What can I do here?” “Why should I be here and not somewhere else?” and “Where do I start?” Additional considerations included changing the visual design to add a human element and adding other visual elements that might resonate with their target audience: women, age 25-45.

The home page was just the beginning as we moved onto designing the two key features of the site: create a wish list and give a gift. A user experience document with annotated wireframes was created suggesting the user flows and screen details. The wireframes contained ideas around customization of gifts and wishes and social networking. We then, quickly shifted to the visual design phase where the wireframes were fleshed-out with the existing look and feel. Usability testing was conducted often to test the concepts and get immediate user feedback. Below is an example from the documentation.