Designing a Gifting Feature
Drove meaningful growth in gifting transactions by creating a customizable interactive gifting experience.
Lead Designer · Product, Engineering & Design · iOS · Q4 Launch
Apple wanted to create a native gifting experience that felt personal, elevated, and unmistakably Apple. With the holiday season approaching, the opportunity was clear: make it easier for customers to purchase and send gifts directly within the Apple Store ecosystem while creating an experience that felt more meaningful than a standard e-commerce transaction.
As the lead designer, I collaborated closely with business strategy, engineering, brand, and design partners to bring the experience to life. Together, we balanced customer needs, business goals, accessibility requirements, localization constraints, and technical considerations to deliver a scalable gifting feature that ultimately drove meaningful growth in gifting transactions.
Elevate the Experience
A core challenge was ensuring the experience felt like gifting and not simply sending a product to someone else.
One of the most important design decisions involved advocating for the signature "peel" interaction that revealed a personalized gift message. While there were opportunities to simplify the interaction, I believed preserving the moment of delight was critical to making the experience feel special and emotionally engaging.
Working closely with engineering, we refined the interaction across multiple iterations to achieve the right balance between performance, polish, and usability. The result transformed a transactional purchase flow into something that felt more personal and memorable.
Reflection
This project reinforced the importance of protecting moments of delight. The simplest solution is not always the best solution. Sometimes the details that seem easiest to remove are the very things that make an experience memorable.