Summary

In 2019, VCCP toured around the UK, setting up pop-up Cadbury Postal Services in shopping centres where people could line up to secretly send a chocolate bar, for free!

We were tasked with making this into a fun digital experience in 2020. Not only did we succeed in selling out the chocolate bars but we far exceeded the expectations for sign ups to Cadbury’s email marketing!

My role

I was the only UX designer on the project for 2-3 months, designing the end-to-end user journeys, working with the client to finesse the user experience at each step from discovery through to delivery, alongside my UX director who was the lead on the project. As it was a compressed timeline, the in-house Tech team were involved in creating the AR experience at the same time.

Cadbury Postal Service Intro
Cadbury Postal Service Intro

Discovery phase

Mapping out the idea

In the initial stages, we had to map out the experience into one large user journey – somewhere between a Service Blueprint and an Experience Map.

Cadbury Xmas - Secret Santa UX Blueprint

Production phase

When the production phase started, I was asked to break down the large flow into individual user journeys in order to understand each part of the experience, and then create wireframes for the experience.

The one part that was quite in flux was the AR Mask component, which evolves throughout this process.

Early Wireframes

After the user journeys then came the wireframing stage. You can see here the early version of the “AR Mask”, with the wireframes depicting the tech solution at the time which was to use the AR solutions built in to Facebook and Instagram (i.e. Spark AR)

Secret Santa Home Page
AR Mask – via social

Wireframe changes (2 hours before client presentation)

One morning, I was due to present wireframes to the client to depict the journey and user experience work so far.

However I had not been informed that we would be showing an experimental version of the AR mask, being done with an untested in-browser experience with Web AR.

2 hours before the meeting, I was told that I would need to present that version, and only that version. This meant re-doing 10 different pages (20 wireframes) in 2 hours! The way I did it was to strip out all the old references, and simply place placeholder boxes where the tech solution would go. As long as the flow was represented and I could voice over the wireframes, I would be fine!

The client presentation went well despite the 2 hours of pandemonium leading up to it. They had no idea that we were unprepared and everything went smoothly! 🙂

Outcomes and outputs

Outputs

The final outputs I created through the project were:

  • Service Blueprint / Journey Map
  • 6 user journeys
  • 50 Annotated wireframes for desktop and mobile (effectively 100)

All leading to one beautifully captured experience!

A few examples of these final outputs are shown below.

  • User Journey – Send via Postal Service
    Postal Service Journey Map
  • Record AR Message Journey
    Secret Santa - Record an AR Message Journey

Wireframe Gallery

User Journey and Blueprint Gallery (examples)

  • Hider User Journey – Sign up and Free/Paid selection
  • Service Blueprint, v4

Outcomes

The project was a success far beyond expected. Contact me for details, as I cannot directly post the numbers in public 🙂

The highlights for me were:

  • Thousands of chocolate bars sent
  • An equal number of bars were donated to the Trussell Trust
  • Excellent user satisfaction scores
  • Huge numbers of sign ups to Cadbury’s email marketing (far beyond expectations)!
“We’re so excited that VCCP have managed to pivot and bring our magical Postal Service experience online for 2020. This year we thought it was more important than ever to let people become a Cadbury Secret Santa and spread a little bit of Christmas magic to a loved one, whatever their reason might be!”

– Paola Cassinelli, Senior Brand Manager from Cadbury

Source