Creating new loyalty program benefit

Problem

  • As a part of a company-wide goal to drive more value for our customers, senior management tasked my product team with adding a new benefit to our loyalty program. In early tests we saw that the benefit was perceived positively by property hosts (partners) but not by guests.

  • I took on responsibility for delivering a benefit that would resonate with both hosts and guests. This meant that I owned the end to end iterative UX process and needed to consistently coordinate with a wide range of stakeholders and navigate technical product limitations and architectural complexities. 

  • Note: The new benefit has not launched yet so, out of an abundance of caution, I have redacted some information. In the ‘role’ and ‘outcome’ sections below, I will focus less on the final words I chose and more on my UX process.

This is the process I followed to design the new benefit. The purple bubbles indicate actions I initiated and/or owned, mapped to the stakeholders I aligned with along the way.

My role

  • Crafted the benefit name and feel, informed by my research finding that guests care most about saving money (and less about how they are saving it).

  • Drove the UI and content design process, collaborating with my team's UX designer and other key stakeholders. 

  • Led a series of sessions to explore and validate alternate design and content approaches to overcome technical limitations. When testing of these approaches continued to show a compromised user-experience and therefore limited business impact, I worked with product management to convince the UX and Tech leads to put the user first and prioritise fixing the technical issues.

  • Aligned with UX writers from different areas of the business to refine the information architecture to accommodate overlaps between their products and this new loyalty program benefit. 

  • Mapped 12 final designs (3 location-based versions x 4 platforms) in Figma and created an implementation guide for developers to ensure content standards were met.

I explored alternative content design approaches when we learned that our initial proposal was blocked. I began with identifying the problems, crafting ‘how might we’ statements, brainstorming options based on constraints, weighing pros and cons of approaches, then conducted user research to get users’ insights.

Outcomes

  • Delivered compelling content for an intricate product that was validated through user testing, overcoming hard user and technical problems in the process. 

  • Raised the bar for user-centred design thinking by challenging decisions from UX and Tech leadership.

  • Provided senior management with the flexibility to launch the new benefit at their discretion – likely in the first half of 2022 .

 
 

An example of my content and design map for iOS in Europe (left) and corresponding developer implementation guide (above).

My early brainstorming notes for creating the benefit name.