Thrive, a food ordering app, had an idea to launch a loyalty program for its users with business goals in mind:
Increase member usability.
Encourage new users to join Thrive.
Drive awareness to the app.
Product strategy:
Create a sister brand identity related to Thrive: Thrive Rewards.
Incorporate a points system for dollar discounts, and eventually product benefits.
Integrate the points and rewards system into the check-out basket to apply for dollar discounts.
Develop an in-app digital scan card for POS kiosk integration to apply points and rewards.
Pilot test the product at one of our customer location site.
Create marketing initiatives at different touch-points to bring awareness to the new program and good on-boarding experience.
Product Manager Iwona Hoffmann
Program Manager Nadia Smith
Design Lead Ashley Mauerhofer
Product Designer Elaine Ng
Junior Product Designer Arjun Narayanan
Software Back-end Developer Inderjeet Sudan
Android Developer Samadhan Malpure
iOS Developer Krishna (team in India)
QA Ludmilla Sivanathan
Business Analyst Alex Koss
Project Manager Diane Lindo
Marketing Manager Michelle Silvestre
Pilot project on hold.
User Flows
With the points/rewards system and branding provided by external vendors, a whiteboard session was needed to brainstorm fundamental questions and assumptions. We came up with the following:
Who are our users?
What are the user goals and business goals?
How does the our third party points/rewards system work?
How will we integrate the existing brand identity in the app?
What are requirements from the Product Manager?
Mapping out journeys of how might customers experience being introduced, on-boarded, and exposed to using the loyalty program, gave us a better understanding of what can be created.
Wireframes
Creating low fidelity wireframes gave me a better sense of content hierarchy and interactive considerations. Early user testing was conducted to ensure better user experience and shed light on any other scenarios we haven’t thought of yet. I was using paper prototypes, Flinto, and InVision between iterations.
UI Design & Interaction Flow
After mapping out an ideal user experience, visual design follows bringing branding and animation into light. Icon creation, micro-copywriting and visual hierarchy all are explored. An interaction flow is produced to ensure proper functionality and demonstrate the user’s journey for my team to build.
User Testing
After much exploration with designing the user interface, it came time to test our design decisions. We conducted usability testing sessions with seven members of the Thrive app. At this point, while running on a timeline, the development team had built an MVP which we used as a prototype to test on both Android and iOS users. We found some interesting results.
Findings
Our key takeaways brought some realizations that required us to make some significant changes. We’ve learnt you don’t always hit a home-run and that failure is part of the process. As a result, in order to keep with the timeline, we made smart changes to bring the loyalty program’s brand closer to Thrive, and run a pilot as promised to test at a bigger location site.
