Secret Santa
Hey, we want to have fun too!
As the 2008 holiday season approached, we realized there was a need for a fun app to handle pick-names-out-of-a-hat gift giving. This is a great example of a "simple" app that required passionate attention to detail.
Overview
Every year, we get together with our families and friends, and several groups want to do a "Secret Santa" gift exchange.
Secret Santa involves picking names out of a hat, so no one in the group knows who is getting gifts for whom. When using paper, people will frequently draw their own names, or draw someone they don't want to pick (such as their spouse, who they will be getting a gift for anyway).
We realized this would be a great app for the iPhone.
Challenges
At first glance, it seems that this should be a straightforward app to create. However, there were some interesting challenges we encountered:
Usability. Because it is very unlikely that everyone in a group will have an iPhone, we needed to create an app that could be passed from person to person. The challenge here is that the device will be passed to people who have never even held an iPhone. So, we needed to create the simplest possible user interface when the phone is being passed.
Math. Ensuring that people wouldn't pick their own names, or of a specific person, proved to be an interesting math puzzle.
Fun! Finally, we wanted the app to be fun and festive.
The Solution
Group List
We created a simple interface for adding names and choosing those you "don't" want to pick.
If you have used the iPhone, you may have noticed that there are several user interface paradigms for managing lists. There are lists of bookmarks in Safari, lists of Contacts, and lists of preferences. Each of these handles their task in a different way.
What seems obvious to one user is not obvious to another. We had to modify our original design after testing the app with non-iPhone users.
Usability
During "pass the phone" mode, there is only one button to press on each screen. This keeps the app super-simple, so that when a non-iPhone user gets it it is obvious what needs to be done.
Fun
We added fun graphics and sounds to make the app festive and get a chuckle from the group.