Rethinking referrals for online merchants
As the Head of Design, I was responsible for the merchant experience on Referralcandy.com, hired and built a lean team of designers, and helped ReferralCandy grow its business revenue.
Summary
Drove revenue growth by influencing product, marketing, and customer support functions as a key member of the leadership team.
Created a design system to unify components, styles, grids, typography, and iconography to improve the efficiency of design delivery.
Design team
Pham Thanh Ha, Product Designer
Desmond Chua, Researcher
Joo Tat Low, Sr. Product Designer
Bobby Kariyatty, Sr. Product Designer
Divyanshu Thakur, Product Designer
Rachel Leung, Product Designer
Timeline
2015-2018
Rethinking referrals for online merchants
As the Head of Design, I was responsible for the merchant experience on Referralcandy.com, hired and built a lean team of designers, and helped ReferralCandy grow its business revenue.
Summary
Drove revenue growth by influencing product, marketing, and customer support functions as a key member of the leadership team.
Created a design system to unify components, styles, grids, typography, and iconography to improve the efficiency of design delivery.
Design team
Pham Thanh Ha, Product Designer
Desmond Chua, Researcher
Joo Tat Low, Sr. Product Designer
Bobby Kariyatty, Sr. Product Designer
Divyanshu Thakur, Product Designer
Rachel Leung, Product Designer
Timeline
2015-2018
Rethinking referrals for online merchants
As the Head of Design, I was responsible for the merchant experience on Referralcandy.com, hired and built a lean team of designers, and helped ReferralCandy grow its business revenue.
Summary
Drove revenue growth by influencing product, marketing, and customer support functions as a key member of the leadership team.
Created a design system to unify components, styles, grids, typography, and iconography to improve the efficiency of design delivery.
Design team
Pham Thanh Ha, Product Designer
Desmond Chua, Researcher
Joo Tat Low, Sr. Product Designer
Bobby Kariyatty, Sr. Product Designer
Divyanshu Thakur, Product Designer
Rachel Leung, Product Designer
Timeline
2015-2018
Overview
ReferralCandy is a referral platform for online businesses through which they can scale their word of mouth marketing, drive revenue sustainably, and cultivate customer loyalty.
Amplifying the function of design
Upon joining the team in 2018, designers were working on small, incremental features. We didn't have any product managers in the company and designers were expected to take ownership of product but didn’t have the required skillsets. We had no systems or frameworks in place, impacting the speed of design delivery.
To establish the design function, I first conducted a series of conversations with 25+ employees. I asked everyone I spoke to three questions:
What do you think the purpose of design is?
How have you worked with design in the past?
What should the immediate responsibility of the design team be?
Through these conversations, I identified key themes and needs across the business and team.
Design's role would be to up-level the existing platform, modernize the brand, and to build future-proof systems to enable shipping high-quality designs.
Key projects
I worked on many more projects during my time at ReferralCandy; if you're interested in hearing about any of them, reach out to me.
Improving the referral dashboard
Business need
ReferralCandy was starting to lag behind newer competitors and needed to become a more modern piece of software, show more useful analytics, and improve its performance to become more useful to merchants.
Goal
Update the dashboard to show more relevant analytics, add new capabilities to increase product-led growth. The bottomline was to have more merchants paying for the product tracked by monthly recurring revenue (MRR).
Personal challenge
ReferralCandy is a 10+ year old product. The many years brought with it performance issues, and an outdated platform. Making any changes, even seemingly simple ones meant trying to untangle many years of legacy code.
This project was a 7-month long project broken up into sizable chunks where I defined the strategy with key stakeholders and collaborated with engineering on various technical challenges, while keeping the design team motivated and inspired.
Results
32% higher usage
94% faster performance
Hit $X million in revenue for the first time
For confidentiality reasons, I have omitted the actual values for these metrics.
Fraud detection
Business need
Referral fraud was becoming an increasing problem especially for merchants, especially larger merchants. They had no way of identifying valid vs fraudulent purchases.
Goal
Design a solution that identifies suspicious activity to merchants so that they don’t end up losing money from fraudulent purchases.
Role
I led design, supported Bobby with user flows, design reviews and collaborated with the product and engineering teams.
Results
Successfully launched to all merchants
~3,100+ fraudulent referrals detected
$XX,XXX saved in referral revenue
For confidentiality reasons, I have omitted the actual values for these metrics.
ReferralCandy's design system
Business need
ReferralCandy had many instances of workflows and components being built in isolation. Over time, this became unwieldy to maintain and ate away at our internal efficiency.
Goal
Build a zero-to-one design system that uses the atomic framework to unify and reuse components, styles, grids, typography, and usage guidelines to improve consistency and speed of design delivery.
Role
I led design, set up the framework, shared best practices and collaborated with the engineering team on a 3-month project.
Results
90% coverage for the design system
Faster implementation speed
Improved app performance
ReferralCandy brand refresh
Business need
The brand that felt dated, lacked personality and didn’t reflect the direction the company was heading in. We also needed to include our new product offering on the marketing website.
Goal
The brand refresh project hoped to modernize the company's outdated and unloved previous brand while improving sign up conversions.
Role
I led design on the project, working with Rachel, and the marketing team. I also brought in an outside illustrator Matthew Wong of Hyperfolk Studios.
Results
3.5% increase in overall signups
None of this would have been possible without the wonderful, kind and amazing team of designers, engineers, and marketers from sunny Singapore.
Zach Cheng
Co-founder, ReferralCandy
Ben has a rare combination of great design skills and awesome people management skills. During his 3 years with us as a head of design, he significantly leveled up our design capabilities, processes and instilled a culture of cross-functional collaboration, customer focus and can-do spirit.
Key projects
I worked on many more projects during my time at ReferralCandy; if you're interested in hearing about any of them, reach out to me.
Improving the referral dashboard
Business need
ReferralCandy was starting to lag behind newer competitors and needed to become a more modern piece of software, show more useful analytics, and improve its performance to become more useful to merchants.
Goal
Update the dashboard to show more relevant analytics, add new capabilities to increase product-led growth. The bottomline was to have more merchants paying for the product tracked by monthly recurring revenue (MRR).
Personal challenge
ReferralCandy is a 10+ year old product. The many years brought with it performance issues, and an outdated platform. Making any changes, even seemingly simple ones meant trying to untangle many years of legacy code.
This project was a 7-month long project broken up into sizable chunks where I defined the strategy with key stakeholders and collaborated with engineering on various technical challenges, while keeping the design team motivated and inspired.
Results
32% higher usage
94% faster performance
Hit $X million in revenue for the first time
For confidentiality reasons, I have omitted the actual values for these metrics.
Fraud detection
Business need
Referral fraud was becoming an increasing problem especially for merchants, especially larger merchants. They had no way of identifying valid vs fraudulent purchases.
Goal
Design a solution that identifies suspicious activity to merchants so that they don’t end up losing money from fraudulent purchases.
Role
I led design, supported Bobby with user flows, design reviews and collaborated with the product and engineering teams.
Results
Successfully launched to all merchants
~3,100+ fraudulent referrals detected
$XX,XXX saved in referral revenue
For confidentiality reasons, I have omitted the actual values for these metrics.
ReferralCandy's design system
Business need
ReferralCandy had many instances of workflows and components being built in isolation. Over time, this became unwieldy to maintain and ate away at our internal efficiency.
Goal
Build a zero-to-one design system that uses the atomic framework to unify and reuse components, styles, grids, typography, and usage guidelines to improve consistency and speed of design delivery.
Role
I led design, set up the framework, shared best practices and collaborated with the engineering team on a 3-month project.
Results
90% coverage for the design system
Faster implementation speed
Improved app performance
ReferralCandy brand refresh
Business need
The brand that felt dated, lacked personality and didn’t reflect the direction the company was heading in. We also needed to include our new product offering on the marketing website.
Goal
The brand refresh project hoped to modernize the company's outdated and unloved previous brand while improving sign up conversions.
Role
I led design on the project, working with Rachel, and the marketing team. I also brought in an outside illustrator Matthew Wong of Hyperfolk Studios.
Results
3.5% increase in overall signups
None of this would have been possible without the wonderful, kind and amazing team of designers, engineers, and marketers from sunny Singapore.
Zach Cheng
Co-founder, ReferralCandy
Ben has a rare combination of great design skills and awesome people management skills. During his 3 years with us as a head of design, he significantly leveled up our design capabilities, processes and instilled a culture of cross-functional collaboration, customer focus and can-do spirit.
Key projects
I worked on many more projects during my time at ReferralCandy; if you're interested in hearing about any of them, reach out to me.
Improving the referral dashboard
Business need
ReferralCandy was starting to lag behind newer competitors and needed to become a more modern piece of software, show more useful analytics, and improve its performance to become more useful to merchants.
Goal
Update the dashboard to show more relevant analytics, add new capabilities to increase product-led growth. The bottomline was to have more merchants paying for the product tracked by monthly recurring revenue (MRR).
Personal challenge
ReferralCandy is a 10+ year old product. The many years brought with it performance issues, and an outdated platform. Making any changes, even seemingly simple ones meant trying to untangle many years of legacy code.
This project was a 7-month long project broken up into sizable chunks where I defined the strategy with key stakeholders and collaborated with engineering on various technical challenges, while keeping the design team motivated and inspired.
Results
32% higher usage
94% faster performance
Hit $X million in revenue for the first time
For confidentiality reasons, I have omitted the actual values for these metrics.
Fraud detection
Business need
Referral fraud was becoming an increasing problem especially for merchants, especially larger merchants. They had no way of identifying valid vs fraudulent purchases.
Goal
Design a solution that identifies suspicious activity to merchants so that they don’t end up losing money from fraudulent purchases.
Role
I led design, supported Bobby with user flows, design reviews and collaborated with the product and engineering teams.
Results
Successfully launched to all merchants
~3,100+ fraudulent referrals detected
$XX,XXX saved in referral revenue
For confidentiality reasons, I have omitted the actual values for these metrics.
ReferralCandy's design system
Business need
ReferralCandy had many instances of workflows and components being built in isolation. Over time, this became unwieldy to maintain and ate away at our internal efficiency.
Goal
Build a zero-to-one design system that uses the atomic framework to unify and reuse components, styles, grids, typography, and usage guidelines to improve consistency and speed of design delivery.
Role
I led design, set up the framework, shared best practices and collaborated with the engineering team on a 3-month project.
Results
90% coverage for the design system
Faster implementation speed
Improved app performance
ReferralCandy brand refresh
Business need
The brand that felt dated, lacked personality and didn’t reflect the direction the company was heading in. We also needed to include our new product offering on the marketing website.
Goal
The brand refresh project hoped to modernize the company's outdated and unloved previous brand while improving sign up conversions.
Role
I led design on the project, working with Rachel, and the marketing team. I also brought in an outside illustrator Matthew Wong of Hyperfolk Studios.
Results
3.5% increase in overall signups
None of this would have been possible without the wonderful, kind and amazing team of designers, engineers, and marketers from sunny Singapore.
Zach Cheng
Co-founder, ReferralCandy
Ben has a rare combination of great design skills and awesome people management skills. During his 3 years with us as a head of design, he significantly leveled up our design capabilities, processes and instilled a culture of cross-functional collaboration, customer focus and can-do spirit.