1. Gift Management System – A Study
Olabode Samuel Adegbayike
For CPSC 503.7 – HCI
Research Project
Calgary, AB Canada
osadegba@ucalgary.ca
ABSTRACT
People expect gifts for different occasions, whether it be
birthdays, anniversaries, a wedding or graduation. Gifts are
usually given for these occasions by attendees in cash, gift
cards or things. It is sometimes difficult to buy a gift for
someone for a certain occasion. Some people like buying
practical gifts and some buy gifts the individual wants
instead of what the individual needs. Individuals being
celebrated sometimes provide hints as to what they need or
want and sometimes they just outright say it. Keeping track
of what those things are for multiple people is not easy and
could sometimes be stressful. All these can be mitigated with
a tool that can keep track of gift ideas for individuals, and
individuals can suggest things they would like. I plan to
investigate a simple way to keep track of these gift ideas by
investigating what such a tool needs to have, then create a
study to see its effectiveness.
Author Keywords
Gift management systems, Gift ideas, occasions.
ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.m. HCI.
INTRODUCTION
We all give gifts to people for different occasions and
sometimes we just need a way to keep track of these
occasions, as well as figure out what to buy. The problem is
people tend to forget events and struggle with what gifts to
buy for certain events and certain individuals.
In order to solve this problem, I sent out a questionnaire to
people between the ages of 18-50 to find out their current
habits for remembering gift ideas, any tools they currently
use to that effect and what issues they might have with such
tools. Then I investigated what tools are out there that can be
used to manage gift ideas including the ones used by the
people that answered the questionnaire. Then I outline the
main themes a current tool needs to have, to make it easier to
build upon. These tools should have been designed to do the
basic tasks of being a note or to-do list system. Focus was
placed on these type of systems as outlined by participants
that answered the questionnaire. These already existing tools
investigated, were then evaluated in a small user study to see
its effectiveness in doing simple tasks that a gift management
should do. The user study was used to bring to my attention
any other tasks the gift management tool could include. This
approach focuses on what people need from a gift
management system. It also will shed light on, if any of the
other current tools out there meets those needs and what can
be improved.
I hope this can further research into to-do list, task
management systems and also keeping track of important
details for specific things like gift ideas. This research can
add to design properties for any of these tools as well as what
people would like the tools to do and why.
RELATED WORK
Steinberg and Wilhelm (2003) suggests through their study
that gift giving has reduced across generations. But, it is not
significant enough to disregard gift giving now. The
monetary value of gifts given has reduced but the giving of
gifts is still very common. Guilt also plays a part in gift
giving, especially in family situations. A parent is very likely
to give a child a gift on occasions like birthdays and
Christmas. The value of these gift does not really matter as
much as the symbol it represents. They can be ceremonial or
for recognition of one’s achievement (Wolfinbarger 1990).
So a tool to manage gift giving is still very useful today, as it
would be with previous generations. Razmerita et al (2009)
showed that using social networking tools in web 2.0 era is a
great way to manage knowledge, and in our case, personal
knowledge. Social networking tools are becoming hubs for
personal information sharing and gathering. This means that
the use of pen and paper for writing things down is becoming
obsolete even if they could be accessible. Callon (1987)
discusses how we must combine social analysis with
technical analysis for design and development of a
technological system. Since gift management is a social issue
that can be solved with technology, it only makes sense to do
some initial interviews with a few people before prototyping
and getting feedback along the way. My approach towards
the problem of gift ideas management is similar to some of
the work done by Bellotti et al (2004). They looked at how
external resources are key in performing complex tasks
which sometimes can include keeping track of gift ideas and
to-do lists. They looked at what people currently use and how
participants managed their to-do list in the pilot study. This
gave them an idea of design implications for their prototype
but also some good information for their long-time study.
Similarly, I asked participants of the survey what they
currently use for remembering gift ideas and how they tie
that to different individuals for different occasions. The
investigation of the tools currently used by survey
participants early on, kept me grounded in solving some
design problems first before the final study, just as they did

2. in their paper. Their prototype was light weight and they
focused on doing tasks that are basic and needed. Hence my
investigation focused on light weight systems with potential
to add on needed functionality to become a gift management
tool as well.
INITIAL PROPOSED WORK
Initially my proposed work was divided into four sections;
investigation, design, implementation and evaluation. The
investigation included the questionnaire and looking into
current tools that currently exist for gift management. For
design, I intended to use the user design experience process.
I was going to create some low-fidelity prototypes, get some
feedback on them and choose the best one to use for the final
prototype design. The implementation was be the creation of
the prototype. Lastly, evaluation would be the user study
using the prototype.
Investigation
A questionnaire was used to ask a few people to understand
their needs in a management tool. The questionnaire also
helped to determine what existing gift management tools are
out there that people already use. I also used this to determine
what issues they currently run into with these management
tools they currently use. Then I investigated any other
management tools out there. This included any management
tool, including event entry like Google Calendar.
Design
I wanted to create some sketches for the prototype based on
results from the questionnaire. I would then discuss these
sketches with classmates, friends and my supervisor for
feedback to choose the appropriate design for the prototype.
I was tentatively going to create the prototype in C#, but this
might change to a more appropriate programming language
and platform during this design phase.
Implementation
I was proposing creating a desktop app prototype that does
the basics as determined with the questionnaire. A mobile
application for the prototype would be better for
accessibility, but with time constraints and also trying to
focus on participants’ ideas and habits, it is best to leave this
for future work. I will then create the prototype in C# and
MySQL for database management. A user has an account
and can add as many individuals as he/she wants. In addition
to that, for each individual added, a multiple of occasions can
be added, like birthday, anniversary etc. Each occasion can
be repeated one time only, multiple occurrences, monthly, or
yearly. Gift ideas can then be added anytime for each
occasion for each occurrence or for all occurrences. Each
user can add gift ideas for himself or herself anytime on their
account. These gift ideas could be gifts they want their
friends or family to get them. This can assist them with
keeping track of their own needs. This is a tentative
functionality of the prototype with changes being made after
results from the prototype. Time constraints might reduce the
scope of the prototype to just basic tasks that are needed by
a gift management system as identified from the initial
questionnaire.
Evaluation
When the prototype is ready, the user study phase will begin
with recruiting participants from friends, friends of friends
and classmates. The study will include using the prototype to
do a few basic tasks and writing down details of use as they
go. What ease they felt while doing the task and what
frustrations they encountered. After finishing doing the
tasks, the participants would answer a few questions about
using the prototype and add any other feedback they might
have. I will give them a quick questionnaire to identify what
systems they currently use for gift management, if any. If the
participant currently uses any gift management tools, the
final questionnaire would ask what functionality they would
add from it to the prototype. This time would also be used to
determine any more functionality to be added to future work.
The study will take into account the participant’s friendship
group and family to determine number of occasions him or
her feels the need to purchase a gift for.
ACTUAL WORK
The work done in my research had a few changes from my
original plan. The work was divided into 3 sections instead
of the initial four. The sections are survey, investigation and
study. This process made me focus more on people’s current
usage of to-do list and note system. Furthermore it made me
focus on how make this systems more usable for a gift
management system. This prevents the creation of a new
system and users from having to download or set up accounts
on a new system, which takes both physical memory on
devices and a new account to manage. I realize that time is
still a factor in learning new features of a system, but users
are more likely to learn and use this new features than learn
a new system entirely. Especially if this new feature is
optional and not forced on the user. This approach focuses
on gathering important data like user preferences and design
strategy before creating a prototype. On the other hand, the
prototype might not be necessary if an existing system can
be adapted to a tool for gift management.
Timeline
Investigating a potential design and functionality of a gift
management tool was done in three phases. Each phase was an
extension of the previous one. Each phase was between 1-4
weeks long. There was 9 and a half weeks of survey
administration, research, user study and Final paper to tie it all
together.
Phase 1 Weeks 1-5 – Questionnaire and Investigation
This was the project set up phase. This included the survey and
investigation of tools discovered in result of survey.
Phase 2 Weeks 6-7 – User Study
User studies was conducted with different people with the
tools investigated as well as questionnaires to be answered
before and after the tools were used.
Phase 3 Weeks 8 – Gather Data
This includes gathering all the data and feedback gotten from
the study and putting together in a more readable format.

3. Phase 4 Weeks 9-10 – Final Paper
Final paper will be written from information gathered from
porotype made, user study, results and future work. Three
minute slide for final defense will be created too.
SURVEY
The survey was an online questionnaire completed by 22
random participants. 9 of which were female and the rest
male. Their ages ranged from 19 to 54. All of the participants
have purchased and given gifts in the past and plan on
continuing to do so. On average, they purchase and give gifts
5 times a year.
Figure 1. Participants who have forgotten to purchase a gift
Figure 2. Number of times participants forgot to give a gift
Figure 3. Participants who purchased gifts last minute
Figure 1 shows how many of participants have forgotten at
least once every year to purchase a gift. This is quite a high
number. The rate at which they forget in figure 2 is very
alarming as well. If people forget that often, there has to be
some reasons why, none of which I look at in this study.
Figure 3 shows how many times people purchase a gift last
minute, which can potentially point to three things. Lack of
care for what gift is purchased, forgetting about purchasing
a gift or not having an idea of what to purchase or give (focus
was placed on answering these questions). I focus in my
research on how we can possibly help reducing the impact
with the latter two. I discuss more in the investigation section
of the research phase. A little over half of the participants use
some type of system (paper, software etc.) to keep track of
their gift ideas. The number was expected to be higher, hence
this might contribute to how people forget to give a gift or
purchase one last minute.
Of the 54.5% of participants that use some type of system for
gift idea tracking, half of them use at least 2 separate system
to do this. This just shows that, one system is not sufficient
enough for their needs to keep track of their gift ideas
amongst other things like reminders. The four main
system/tools used by these participants are Wunderlist,
paper, notes on devices, Google Keep, Evernote and calendar
reminders.
Over half of the participants use either guesses, gut feeling,
or assumptions to judge check if they are getting the right
gift. This can lead to receiver of these gifts not using the gift
at all or giving it to someone else. Some of their replies
included “Magic” as how they know they are getting the right
gift. This might be an outlier but most of the other responses
are not too far off.
INVESTIGATION
After the survey results were looked over and important
information were reviewed, I decided to break down the
work into two for investigation. First, determine what
functionality a gift management tool should have. The tool
has to meet these criteria for it to be worth using and effective
to reduce last minute gift purchases and forgetting to give
gifts. The second was to look at the tools that were currently
being used by participants to track gift ideas, and see how
they already measure up to the criteria I created. The ones
that have the core functionality, would find it easier to add
other functionality remaining from the criteria I created, to
let them be used as a gift management tool as well.
Gift Tool Criteria
There came up with ten criterions needed for a gift
management tool to meet the needs of its users. These
criterions were gathered from looking at common themes in
the survey results, personal research into gift giving and
research into to-do lists. It is important to note that, any
existing tools to be considered as a basis for gift management
may not meet all of this criterion but might meet some with
the ability to meet others easily. These criterions can co-exist
with other to-do list systems and can be hidden or not forced
on users but the option for its usage should be present.

4. Contact List
There needs to be list of all individuals the user would like
to keep track of gift ideas for. Just as we have contact list for
phone numbers, email and address. Events can be added to
the contact like birthdays, wedding anniversary. These
events would have dates attached to them as well.
User Account – Login/logout
The tool should be able to handle unique users that have
accounts they can edit containing their basic information.
Basic information has to include but not limited to; full name
and date of birth.
Search
Search is an easy way to get to data or information without
having to click through a dozen links blindly. The search
should include contacts and list.
Groups
Groups of folders include Family, friends, and colleagues.
This gives the user the opportunity to separate focus.
Especially for holidays or special events. Family usually give
each other gifts during Christmas and co-workers for a gift
exchange of some sort.
Reminder
We sometimes forget things, but with the introduction of
push notifications, we can see events when they happen on
our smartphones, tablets and computers. Reminders can be
set for a particular list, contact or group. This can include
when it is time to buy a gift, time of event/occasion and when
to start creating a list.
Event Repeat
Event added for a contact can be repeated yearly, monthly,
weekly or daily. This flexibility is necessary especially when
the event itself repeats like birthdays and wedding
anniversaries.
Lists
Users can add multiple lists attached to a single contact can
name the list. The list can be attached to an event like a
birthday. Lists should not expire and can be edited at any
time. This lets the user collect gift ideas all year long, and
have them saved till it is no longer needed.
Collaboration
Each user can collaborate on a list with other users. An
anonymous email or text can also be sent to a potential
receiver of a gift to request gifts they would like to receive.
This keeps the mystery while still making sure the gift is
what the receiver wants.
Portability
Such tool has to be mobile friendly as well. It should have
mobile applications, so users can put in gift ideas, whenever.
A desktop application might be useful if offline mode is
implemented.
Minimal Design
The design has to be minimalistic so as to avoid users
spending too much time on it to perform a simple task.
Adding lists, updating lists and searching should be easy to
do and easy to find.
Core Criterions
Out of these ten criterions, six of them are the most important
and they should exist in a current tool that we would like to
build upon to get a gift management tool as well. They are:
Reminders, Folders/Groups, event repeats, lists and
collaboration. These functionalities don’t have to be fully
ready in detail but some part of it should currently exists in a
tool to be extended as a gift management tool. If this is the
case, it makes it easier to add the other four functionality, and
worth it to add. This is not to say others are not key, it just
means that these six rank higher in priority than others.
Tools Research
Now that we have these criterions, we can check some of the
tools identified by the survey participants, to see if they meet
most, if not all of the criterions. I researched three different
tools from the survey results.
Wunderlist
This is a to-do list by default. It manages to meet the five out
of the six criterions in some capability. It has folders which
can serve as groups as well. This folders can be edited,
deleted and new ones can be added as well. They are easy to
find and navigate through. List creation is in the backbone of
this application. It is easy to add and it is on the main page
when logged in, front and center. It is the main focus for the
application. Checking for completed task is just a step away
and hidden to focus on uncompleted ones. When a new task
is added to a list, reminder and repetition of the task is easily
added (optional). The problem this might pose for gift
management, is that the reminder is needed for each list as
well, not just the tasks or in this case, a gift idea. Repetition
has the same potential problem. Wunderlist has the potential
for collaboration too. You can send messages to other users
and share a list as well. This is the foundation needed before
we can set up anonymous collaboration. Other functionality
that Wunderlist provides currently that meets the criterions
include, search, portability, minimal design and user
account. Users can search through their lists and folders
without hassle and it returns accurate results. It has both
desktop and mobile applications. It has a mobile application
for the three main OS providers; OSX, Android and
Windows. Users have a basic account that needs very little
information for setup. The only main thing, Wunderlist does
not currently possess is the contact list functionality. You
can’t have folders for a particular contact. List can be
assigned for another user to complete but that does not work
for creating a list for a particular contact without their
knowing. Wunderlist has the potential to have this added
functionality added for it to serve as gift management tool
alongside a to-list tool.
Google Keep
This is a simple to-do list. It meets only a few of the ten
criterions. Because of its simple nature and minimalistic
design, it has the potential to increase its functionality. In
some capability it meets four of the core criterions. The core

5. criterions it meets in some form are: reminders, lists,
collaboration and labels (which can be classified as groups).
It has a reminder function for every list created, and this seem
to work seamlessly with push notifications on its mobile and
desktop applications (on Windows). Its reminder can be used
as a time reminder or a location reminder. This is useful for
a gift management tool if you need reminding when you get
home, to wrap a gift. The lists functionality is the core of the
system. Easy to add new, edit and delete lists. There is also
the check mark feature to show which tasks have been done.
The checked task go to the bottom but they aren’t hidden.
This can give the user a snapshot not to buy the same gift
twice, especially if it has already been checked off. That is
its difference from Wunderlist on tasks completed.
Collaboration is just as robust as Wunderlist. It sticks to the
simple sharing functionality, where multiple people can edit
a list at once and see live changes from others. For the
purpose of a gift management tool, this feature would need
to include asking for suggestions on the content of the list,
without given away the original sharer of the list, hence
keeping anonymity. Users can add multiple labels to a list
and display only notes with a certain label. This is especially
a feature that could benefit a gift management tool. A contact
could be under multiple folders/groups. Although the idea of
the label is to organize lists, it potential use for gift
management would be to organize gift lists for a contact by
the user. Google keep is available as both mobile and desktop
applications hence making it usable across all devices and
information synced. The search functionality is a little more
robust can be streamlined to a particular type of list. Since
lists can be color coated, search can be done instantly on a
particular color, instead of searching all the lists created.
Search can also be filtered by content type; audio, video and
text. All these search features are beneficial in producing
accurate results, when a user searches for a gift within a
group or list for a gift management tool. Images, audio and
video can also be added to a list. A potential user of a gift
management tool, could use this to take pictures of videos of
physical gift ideas and attach it to a list without knowing the
name of the gift or spending so much time on figuring out
the name and price of the gift idea. The two main downsides
to Google Keep, is that, it doesn’t have automatic repeat
reminders or timely reminders (yearly, monthly etc.) for each
list or task. This should not be hard to implement, since the
basic reminder already has the base functionality. The other
is the contact list functionality. You can’t assign multiple list
to a contact just like we assign phone numbers to name in
phone address books.
Evernote
Unlike the other two tools I investigated above, this is
notebook style tool. Instead of to-do and lists as its main
feature, it focuses on taking detailed notes, like OneNote
from Microsoft. Evernote’s notebook function can act as the
base for a folder structure. If adopted for a gift management
tool. The notebook lets you add multiple notes and pages like
a physical notebook would. For the creation of lists, a note
has to be created first, then a list can be created in the note.
This adds an extra layer of transition to get to a list. This
might not be as quick to use for a gift management tool as
Wunderlist and Google Keep would. Each note can have a
reminder on them and the reminder can be removed or set to
complete. The reminder is a push notification but it stays on
even after the event reminder time has passed, if it isn’t
removed when the task is marked complete. Although no
more notification are presented after set time as passed, it
seems unreasonable to still have a reminder that doesn’t do
any reminding after its time as passed. This could cause a
problem for a gift management tool functionality by putting
users in a panic even if they have completed purchasing their
gift ideas. Collaboration functionality is tiered from free to
paid account. The free account (which I am concerned with),
has the base collaboration functionality. You can share notes
(or lists if notes only contain them) and discuss the content
of the note. This is not enough for collaborative gift idea list.
Editing of the list should be core for all collaborators of the
list. Evernote has a very rich text editing functionality for its
notes, so this could be a good port for gift ideas list recording.
Out of all three tools investigated, Wunderlist and Google
keep stood out for extendibility without creating a new
system on top of it or alongside it. They both have most of
the core functionality a gift management tool needs to
succeed. It would be less strenuous to fulfill the other
criterions.
USER STUDY
I recruited five people to use the above three systems to
perform some tasks a gift management tool should be able to
handle. There were four females and one male. Two of the
participants were a married couple. All participants had a
significant other and had civil relationships with their
parents. None of them had used any of the three systems
before. So I gave them a quick introduction into what the
systems were designed to do. The tasks were:
 Create 3 gift idea list for your parents and your
significant other for their birthdays.
 Add a reminder for all 3 after doing the first tasks.
 Find a specific gift in one of the lists using the search
tool and mark the gift has purchased.
I chose these simple tasks to test out the core criterions. After
doing this, I asked them a few questions about how they felt
like using the systems. I also asked them for feedback and
how they could change or improve the system for gift
management.
Results
It took all the participants five to ten minutes to complete all
three tasks. They all said they needed a few minutes to
understand the system enough to do the tasks. Three of the
participants said they has made the lists but were not sure
how to categorize them with Wunderlist and Evernote. Once
they finally figured out folders in Wunderlist, it was smooth
sailing from there onwards. They eventually found that they

6. could use multiple notes in notebook. Although one
participant used 3 different notebooks for all three people she
created lists for. Reminders were straightforward as they has
no difficulty adding them. Searching was the only task that
the group was divided on. Three of them found it hard to
understand what Google Keep advanced search options
meant until I explained it to them. The other two found it
easier to use although their search result would not have been
different if they didn’t use it.
Feedback
The participants, felt they could see themselves using at least
one of the tools in their day-to-day lives. Only one of the
participants could potentially use all three for different
purposes. And only one would use Wunderlist only. The
other three were comfortable using a combination of any two
of the three. They all voiced some level of support for
Wunderlist and Google Keep, as better tools to be adapted
for a gift management tool, but since it is not advertised to
be such, it would be difficult to use it for that purpose. I asked
them to write down, what functionality they would like a gift
management tool to possess. Four out of five of them agreed
on reminders, lists were essential to such a tool. They
believed that if those two things are met, people would use
it. When presented with the ten criterions I had established
from my personal research, they had mostly praise for all of
them but had a few questions. They pointed out that the
anonymity functionality could be misused and abused by
some users. They suggested that some sort of monitoring
needed to be included in it. Two of them did not think that
the gift management function, if added to an existing tool,
should be hidden. They mostly agreed that if it were to be
built as added functionality to any of the three tools, it had to
be Google Keep and maybe Wunderlist but not Evernote.
They loved the way Google Keep showed you all your list in
sections and you could scroll through. Although, they
believed the gift management tool should be its own tool by
itself mainly, while to-do list can be added as a bonus feature.
FUTURE WORK
Future work could take one or two pathways. One pathway
would be to see the feasibility of adding functionality needed
for a gift management tool to Google Keep as that is the more
preferred system. One of the things to also look at if this
pathway is taken, is to see if the gift tool function be out of
the way, if the user just needs the system for its lists function.
The other pathway would be to create a prototype with the
ten criterions and doing a long term observational user study
on the prototype to determine its productivity. My original
proposed work seems like a better idea after this initial
information gathering has been completed. The design phase
of the prototype can have a robust template to go by before
being deployed for a study.
CONCLUSION
While the research and study shed some light, it is just the
beginning of the topic. This is barely scrapping the surface
to developing a tool that is very well needed in assisting
people with keeping track of one the valuable things we give
and receive; gifts. During the user study phase, the question
of misuse of anonymity came up. This can be mitigated by
allowing users to report abuse just like in other social
networking sites. The system itself should keep track of such
a problem. A gift management tool is not just another to-do
list tool. We have task managers, to-do list tools and project
management tools currently. All of which have been
researched quite extensively except for one thing that people
need assistance with tracking. And that is gift management.
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