GIPHY

a case study

timeframe: 2 weeks

GIPHY is a popular website that offers the ability to find animated gifs of all kinds. Their goal is to make gifs into the new internet language, allowing for people to respond to one another online entirely in gif-form.

This was a case study presented to my group during my user experience program.

THE PROBLEM

Even though GIPHY is one of the internets number one places to get gifs, even having been integrated in Facebook and Slack chat, they did not have a GIF creation tool. To allow users to easily create and post their own, custom gifs would not only increase their content but would allow them to get even closer to their goal of a new 'gif-language.'

THE TASK

Implement a gif-making feature on Giphy’s current website.
Users should be able to create, customize, and share their gifs.
Users should be able to add captions.
This feature would allow for a leveraging of their existing database and capture future opportunities to seed viral content.

MY ROLE

Create all copy, including survey/interview questions, personas, user-stories, in-app, and presentation.
Interviews and iterations; making sure that the problems we ran into through testing got resolved in the best possible ways.
Design creation and detail reviewer.
Heuristic/Best Practices. Made sure that we were creating an application that was wasy, fun, useful, and represented the brand.
Presentation organization and creation.

FINDING THE SOLUTION

After running some competitive and comparative analyses, our team determined that there were many small details that we had to consider, such as uploading capabilities and functionality, and there were questions we needed to ask the users, such as for what kinds of situations they would create gifs, and what would they want to add or change to that gif if they could. The answers to these questions gave us a good idea that, for the average user, the creator tool needs to be, or at least seem, very simple and self-explanatory.

Thus, as we created our personas, the features we'd most need became apparent: Easy upload of an existing gif to the database with an option to edit that gif or publish it immediately. Adding captions to the gif, adjusting the frames, and adding color-adjust options as well. Keeping it organized on one page was very important as well, so as to keep users from having to scroll for too many options and becoming overwhelmed.