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