Client
bol
Year
2025
Services
AI Design
User research & Testing
UX Design
Background
In preperation for the holiday season, bol wants to support their users in finding gifts for their loved ones. In comes the AI Gift Finder/Cadeauhulp. This conversational AI chatting experience, helps users with finding inspirational ideas for a gift, or a direct product that may fit their needs.
Challenge
At this point in time, DEPT® had already done concepting for the Gift Finder. Though bol felt there were still opportunities to enhance the user experience before releasing it to the public. My role here was to seek these opportunities; I had done so by setting up the pilot for the Gift Finder. Consisting of a mixed methodology approach with usability tests and retrospective interviews. Learning about what users do, and say regarding gift finding via a conversational chat experience.
Variety in suggestions
Users struggled in getting enough variety in products per output, variety in product categories, as well as products. With the limit being set to 4 products per output, users often relied heavily on the quick suggestion chips to rapidly gain more products suggested to them.
The quality of chat interaction
When chatting with the Gift Finder, users generally showed 2 prompting styles. Either keyword focussed, or writing longer story prompts. Users who wrote longer prompts, were frustrated that the chat's input field didn't allow for reading back a prompt before sending it. Also Chat behavior when sending a prompt and being in the middle of an entire chat field became disorienting.
Losing a chat
When navigating between a product detail page and a chat, users on some occasions double tapped the back button. The back button (for both product detail pages, as well as the chat) were on the same position, this made users exit the chat, and lose their history. In other occassions, users also had performance issues. This either made a chat wipe, or made users want to restart their chat.
FAB's and mental modals
Entering the Gift Finder, goes via the floating action button on the home page. In some cases, users expected the entry point for the Gift Finder to be within a search, tile, or card. For them, this aligns more with their mental modal of how they see and imagine the layout of the bol app.
Fun gift finding
To improve the user experience with the Gift Finder, some key improvements were made regarding the LLM behavior to increase variety, as well as gaining an increased output. Chatting with the Gift Finder now ensures clarity while staying informative, by making sure users go to the most up to date chat message when engaging with the chat. As well as now using an input area, instead of a field. Allowing users to always know what they are prompting. Regarding future improvements, some experiments such as an additional entry point have been added to the backlog.
As of October 2025, bol's first conversational AI on the consumer journey is live. With 15-20k daily users, and over 64% of users saying it makes "finding gifts more fun".
