WeddingWire Registry

Enhancing the gift-giving experience for engaged couples and their wedding guests

Overview

WeddingWire is the global online leader in connecting engaged couples with wedding professionals. Through WeddingWire, couples are offered in-depth information and reviews for vendors, as well as a suite of online planning tools. For vendors, WeddingWire simplifies their daily business needs by unifying lead generation, marketing, and business management tasks. In 2019 WeddingWire merged with XO Group to form The Knot Worldwide.

During my time at WeddingWire, I worked as the product design lead on the newly formed Guest Experience team. The team was formed as an effort to unite the gap between behind-the-scenes wedding planning and the pieces of the wedding planning process that guests interact with. We were tasked with a challenge; How might we connect wedding guests with their engaged couples to enhance and simplify the guests' experiences at every digital touchpoint. The first touchpoint that we focused on was the gift registry.

The challenge

In 2017 WeddingWire did not have its own registry experience. As a workaround, engaged couples would link to their external retail registries from their WeddingWire website. For both engaged couples and wedding guests, this meant that users could not view all registry items in one spot. The makeshift solution felt disparate and generic because it was lacking proper integration and personalization. From a business perspective, WeddingWire was not gaining anything from linking out to other retail websites and taking users to a new site. There was a major opportunity here to change the experience so that guests could easily find what they were looking for, engaged couples could integrate their registry with their existing wedding materials and add personalization, and the business could establish a new revenue stream.

Design process

The Guest Experience team kicked off with a hands-on workshop where we got together to define the wedding guest journey. In this workshop, we identified key moments and milestones, along with opportunities and new ideas. Following our sessions, we also took a look at what resources we already had available to us, such as the existing “Create a wedding website” tool on WeddingWire, as well as a partnership with a registry service called, Newlywish. We decided to focus first on registry.

After we defined our focus, I worked on some competitive analysis research to understand the registry space and where we could stand out. Then I moved into flow diagrams, sketching, ideation, and wireframes, working closely with product, engineering, and QA to define requirements. Visual design came next, in collaboration with both our user research team and branding teams.

There were some technical difficulties getting the aggregation aspect of our registry working, so my journey on registry stopped after visual design; however, if it were to have continued, we would have moved into user testing and iteration.

Solution

WeddingWire Registry is a tool that consolidates all of an engaged couple’s retail registries into one place, providing those couples the opportunity to add whatever they’d like from wherever they’d like. WeddingWire registry then syncs with WeddingWire’s wedding website tool, giving guests one place to go when they are looking to purchase a wedding gift for a specific couple. Seamlessly, the aggregated view keeps gift information up to date.

WeddingWire Registry also opens the door for so much business opportunity in that it provides a platform to sell products and advertise.

Please note: this solution was a work in progress, as I ended my time at WeddingWire.

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