Refreshing personalized offers

Starbucks

Interaction design | UI design | Prototyping | Writing

Role: Lead product designer

Team: 2 designers, 2 researchers, 2 PMs, 2 engineering teams (iOS, Android), marketing tech, marketing operations

Duration: 6 months

Tools: Sketch, Zeplin, Abstract, Jira

Platforms: Native apps (iOS & Android)

Project overview

Background

Personalized offers allow customers to earn Bonus Stars by completing various purchase-based challenges. Stars can be redeemed for rewards in the app.

Challenge

Personalized offers have experienced an incremental revenue decline over the past few years.

Solution

Return personalized offers to a growth trajectory by enhancing the offers experience in the app.

Goals

Increase NIR (net incremental revenue)
Increase offer opt-ins, engagement, and wins

Why the decline in revenue?

Our researcher conducted user interviews to uncover current pain points:

Confusion about what they get, what they need to do, and when they need to do it by
Offers seemed very generic, lack of personalization
Feasibility around completing the offer and whether it’s worth it (This was program-dependent, but still important to share with our marketing stakeholders)

Define initiatives

After interviewing customers, we understood that in terms of the engagement funnel, the aspects that were causing friction with customers were the “interest” and “desire” stages.

Leveraging customer and market research and working with marketing, product, and research teams, we identified 2 initiatives to increase NIR:

Refresh offers functionally and visually
Provide element of choice with new offer construct

First Initiative: Refresh existing offers

Goal: Improve clarity through functional and visual enhancements

Collaborating with another designer, she tackled the visual aspects of the refresh, and I focused on the functional improvements. I identified some opportunities for improvement:

Information hierarchy: Not organized in a clear way,
CTAs: Placement was not cohesive with the rest of the app content and not visually prominent
Headline and body copy: Internal names were confusing and sometime meaningless to customers
Interactions: Offer details hidden behind CTA, route customers several layers deep to the app inbox

Improvements

Surface essential offer information on card: the reward, the instructions, and the deadline
Overhaul copy to improve clarity
Include terms and conditions and any offer rules behind a modal
Make the primary CTA more prominent and inline with content throughout the app

Second Initiative: Create new offer construct

Goal: Improve perceived personalization by introducing the element of choice

In collaboration with a researcher, we recruited 12 participants and concept tested 2 design variants of a new offer construct that would introduce choice, in order to gather initial impressions and sentiment. Most participants liked the concept of this offer.

I created two concepts that varied in terms of specific elements to get a broad understanding:

Header style
Instructional copy
Option selection
CTA copy

Ideate designs

With our direction defined, I started exploring various offer layouts and visuals for this new offer. Since this was a new construct that was built from and needed to integrate with existing offers, I partnered closely with the iOS and Android lead developers. We collaborated on the best and most efficient ways to build the selection states, image and copy handling, and edge cases.

I also regularly solicited feedback from my fellow designers to ensure that everything fit and flowed in the context of the whole app experience and branding.

Validate designs through usability study

Research goals:

Do participants understand the concept of the offer?

Everyone easily understood how the offer works and liked having a choice
Some had questions around the rules
- I included this information in the “Terms and Conditions” modal

What copy do they prefer?

Most preferred copy A for both title and instructions

Project summary

Impact and outcomes

First Initiative: Refresh existing offers

9% increase in offer opt-ins
34% increase in net incremental revenue from the previous year

Second Initiative: Create new offer construct

New weekly NIR record for any offer
1-2 pp higher win rate than any offer

Key takeaway

Offers are an important part of the business, but need to be thoughtfully integrated and optimized in the context of the app.

Next steps

Conduct research on other ways to address lack of personalization
Consider revamping the program to make offers more appealing to customers
Integrate offers and ordering more closely in the app