Project objectives
Increase usage of loyalty cards
The existing loyalty card had low usage with only a small segment of customers earning stamps and rewards.
Increase reward redemption
Build systems to reduce customers losing earned stamps and rewards because they expired.
Create a delightful experience
Craft an enjoyable and satisfying experience for customers that make it easy for them to earn stamps and redeem rewards.
Early insights
Rationale for moving away from the original punchcard designs —
Punchcards needed to be more intuitive
We needed to support more than 10 stamps per card
Merchants wanted to offer up to 3 rewards tiers
Co-designing with customers
Key questions customers asked:
“When do my stamps expire?”
“What is my reward?”
“How many stamps for silver and gold rewards?”
The first designs we explored were using progress bars. While these helped with scale, they didn’t perform well during usability tests.
What we learnt
Having a single progress bar with milestones reduced ambiguity.
Multiple rewards triggered people’s interest to interact with it.
The info displayed was still too much that it overwhelmed new users
North star principles
Research insights that led us to defining our product principles.
Prioritize speed
Merchants care about speed above all else. To them, slow queues mean lost revenue.
Minimize distractions
Improve IA, limit options and simplify designs to lower cognitive load for customers.
Clear feedback loop
Show customers their reward progress and give immediate feedback to keep them engaged when they earn a reward.
Solutions
We finally landed on this design using for loyalty progress. Why?
It was a simple concept that most customers are already familiar with.
Optimized for visibility in busy, fast moving queues at different physical stores.
Highlighted key information like any rewards to be redeemed and expiry.
Impact
Updating the loyalty card to the new designs have increased engagement and retention rates for the customer experience at the time of writing (3 months since launch).
12% higher rewards usage
23% higher engagement rates
87% increase in task success rates from usability tests
For confidentiality reasons, I have omitted the actual values for these metrics.
Key takeaways
Building shared empathy
I implemented a process that allowed engineers, marketing and customer support to become a staff member at a few stores. This was a big win which helped our team (especially non-designers) build empathy for merchants.
Embracing experiments
We did many quick experiments with partner merchants and real customers which dramatically improved the quality of our designs.
Killing your darlings
Scrapping concepts, zooming out, and involving teammates early helped us gain new perspectives and uncover better solutions quickly.