Please Amazon, make gifting easier!

Humans are preoccupied. We understand there's sentiment attached to sending a real gift, or even just a simple card, but there are too many blocks along the way to actually do it. Wait, it’s Jen’s birthday? What’s her address again? Didn't she move last year? We end up sending a text message two days late or even worse, doing nothing at all. 


Amazon can right this wrong. Only Amazon can make it so easy to send a gift that not sending one becomes unforgivably rude. Why? Because they have all of our mailing addresses. It's the last remaining point of friction that no brand has been able to successfully remove. Based on a recent study we conducted in our U.S. offices, 50% of respondents had zero mailing addresses in their phones. A quarter had five or fewer. And most respondents were only aware of important dates the day-of through Facebook.


We need a tool that never forgets an important date, always knows a mailing address, and allows us to add a personalized touch so that every gift feels special. Here’s how it should work...

 

There's so much potential for a service that makes sending a gift or card fast and easy. So let's do this, Amazon. It's time to take your gifting game to the next level. 

 

©AKQA 2015, Confidential and Proprietary

I'm not going to lose faith in humanity.

Zarbee's partnered with AKQA to create an awareness campaign for their new natural congestion relief product called Seasonal Relief. Our idea was a responsive microsite that encouraged users to sample the product and report back how it worked. 

We partnered with four different charities that were complimentative to the Zarbee's brand and audience. With each "report back", Zarbee's offered to donate a dollar amount to a charity of the users choice. After a week, we were not getting as many "report backs" as we wanted and so we decided to also incentivize people with a Gift Pack, basically company swag. "Report backs" tripled in a matter of days. Customers wanted those brand water bottles and night lights! Three times more than feeding a child or sending another to summer camp.

It was a lesson for me for sure.

“Getting something is greater of an incentive than giving something.”

The Beauty in Tactility

Ever since the dawn OS7, designers have turned their back on tactile design in favor of flat, one color shapes. Yet there is so much beauty in dimensional art, as perfectly exemplified in one of our recent projects. Designed for a connected home experience, look how beautiful and tactile these controls are...

I like slick, flat design as much as the next person. It evokes modernity and quickness in a lot of digital experiences. But I do feel there are certain experiences that would benefit from the extra attention to detail that designing with dimension requires. This one being one of those perfect examples.

 

Thanks for stopping by.