Inspiration
What's the one event where you absolutely have to buy something for someone? It's a birthday! We saw an intriguing opportunity to use hyper-personalisation to boost TikTok Shop and extend it beyond its little tab to the entire app.
We realised that introducing TikTok Shop as the most convenient way to buy gifts for friends would be a natural and effective form of hyper-personalised shopping.
What it does
During account creation, TikTok requires users to enter their date of birth. A nice benefit of this is that TikTok's vast database knows exactly when all your friends' birthdays are approaching.
A few weeks before a friend's birthday 🎉, a card with your friend's face pops up, reminding you that their birthday is coming soon. The secret sauce is the three recommendations based on your friend's activity that appear on the card, along with a call to action to look for more gifts.
However, the real magic happens when you click on the button. A custom shopping page is created just for that friend, Kushal's custom shopping page! (Kushal is one of our amazing team members and a close friend).
This page is highly refined. With context from the birthdate, we only show items that can be delivered before the birthday. Items preferred as gifts are heavily weighted, while household items like toilet paper or soap are filtered out.
Based on my friend's interests, gathered from their browsing habits, this page features specific tabs in the recommended section. For example, Kushal is a huge football fan and avid player, so there are tabs for football accessories and boots. For someone else interested in cooking, there would be tabs for kitchen appliances.
We take this a level further by allowing the gift-buying experience to be shared. You can share this custom shopping page with any of your friends, and they can join in. Together, you can shortlist items and purchase them later. You can also set a budget (per person or as a group), and the recommendation algorithm will filter choices to show items within your price range.
The amazing thing is this can be used for a multitude of occasions, not just birthdays. Think Mother's Day, Father's Day, Christmas, Chinese New Year, and many more gift-giving occasions.
How we built it
Building this was an enriching experience full of learning. We started with a strong brainstorming session for ideas, and as we filtered them out, we found this concept of occasion-based cards on your FYP along with custom shareable shopping pages was super interesting and effective.
With some basic design work on Canva, we divided up tasks and started coding a prototype while developing the Technical Design Document. Over time, as a team, we were able to create this very project!
Challenges we ran into
From relentless bugs to design debates, there were numerous challenges along the way, but together as a team, we enjoyed overcoming them one at a time. One major challenge was getting comfortable with documenting our solution as a TDD, editing it as a team, and deciding what should be included and what should be left out.
As computer science students, it took us a while to get in tune with designing UIs with user stories in mind. However, as we collaborated and learned more, this part became fun and fruitful.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are really proud of everything we achieved as a team. From the ideation of our concept of occasion-based shared shopping pages that are hyper-personalised to a single person, to writing the Technical Design Document, and then coding our own prototype, we did a great job and had an amazing time.
What we learned
We learned how important communication is in a team to build such a novel project in the time we had. Looking back, it’s amazing how we grew as better communicators and team players. Additionally, after working on our project, I gained a newfound appreciation for writing documentation, such as a Technical Design Document, as a means to communicate the value a product or feature can drive to a customer.
What's next for The Shareable Occasion Based Shopping Page
We are really proud and very excited to see the Shareable Occasion-Based Shopping Page we developed being used by users to help them buy gifts for the people they care about.
Moving forward, once we develop a more polished prototype and integrate a test version with a large database of products from TikTok Shop, the plan is to conduct iterative testing on this product, fine-tuning the recommendation algorithms as we hope to one day see its release!
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