ShareParty is a non-profit initiative aimed at inspiring families to regift and exchange toys, games & books, rather than purchase new ones. Their goal is to cultivate strong community bonds and promote environmental consciousness while ensuring our children have access to an array of items that ignite their creativity.
Our Objectives
Design a website that activates and supports the ShareParty movement
Help users navigate to resources that will help them host or participate in toy swap and regifting events
Promote ShareParty's brand goals of sustainability, equity, and joy
We conducted interviews with several of ShareParty’s previous collaborators and found that organizations were struggling with the discoverability of ShareParty events.
We surveyed 20+ parents to find out their initial thoughts on regifting and their current mental model in this area. Here is some of the survey data:
Insights
New visitors to the website are confused as to what a ShareParty is
Individuals are interested in attending, but had not previously heard of ShareParty events
People are reluctant to host their own ShareParty events because they don't know what hosting entails
Parts of the ShareParty event process are unclear on both an individual and organization level, and they have very different needs
During this process, our client wanted to introduce a new event idea that would shift the focus of ShareParty to a more decentralized and individual-focused approach, Birthday ShareParties.
A Birthday ShareParty is a movement that encourages families to request pre-owned toys as birthday gifts. With this new idea, it takes the pressure off our client and mobilizes micro-communities.
We decided to refocus our strategies to emphasize Birthday Share Parties over ShareParty’s current toy swap events because the goal of overcoming the stigma of regifting would be better accomplished through mobilizing smaller micro-communities.
After gaining a better understanding of the direction of the project and synthesizing our insights, we made a plan to act on these strategies:
With the help of our client, we were able to establish a new information architecture through card sorting. Our new architecture makes the mission of ShareParty clear and lends equity to both birthday shareparties and community swap parties as opportunities to join the movement.
Old Information Architecture
Redesigned Information Architecture
Some Highlights
To provide guidance and support for organizations and individuals who are interested in throwing their own shareparties and swap parties, we took ShareParty’s step by step guide and put it directly on the website. We added previews of the downloadable Canva resources for users to see what they are opening and an FAQ section.
Since we found that organizations were struggling with discoverability, we wanted users to share their involvement on social media. We also created a QR code for people to easily share the website with their friends or parent groups. ShareParty hosts can also add this QR to promotional material or around their event to help attendees understand why they should participate in more ShareParties.
