A lean, iterative MVP approach for a custom internal tool to upload offer data and lay the foundation for real-time load-to-card offers for AIR MILES Collectors.
Company: Loyalty One • My role: Senior Product Designer
The problem
Offers were delivered by printable coupons and took months to produce. As shopping trends evolved and consumers desired more personalized offers, AIR MILES had to find a way to generate relevant offers in real-time for our different partners in order to stay competitive in the loyalty landscape.
The opportunity
Build new technology and create a new process for publishing offers within the organization. Establish a single source of truth for offer data that can be consumed by other teams. Minimize human error in reviewing offers to accelerate our time to market. Standardize the process with Rexall first, with the intention to scale and include all partners.
Getting started
Using a lean agile, iterative approach, I worked with the Product Owner and users (Client Services & Publishers) to determine the minimum features & functionality they needed.
I hosted discovery sessions with users to understand their current process and what their needs were in order to learn what would be most valuable to them to complete their tasks.
Defining requirements
Discussions with business stakeholders and users resulted in seven primary outcomes for the product:
1. Create a single source of truth for offers (they were currently living in 6 different systems, so one change meant updating an offer in 6 places)
2. Reduce the offer cycle from 3+ months to less than 2 weeks
3. Load offers to an AIR MILES card in real-time
4. Ability for client services to preview the data as it would appear live to reduce errors
5. Needed a kill switch so that a campaign could be cancelled at any time
6. Streamline the interface for Publishers with feedback alerts (success/errors)
7. The offer data needed to be consumed by the mobile app & the web experience
Creating clarity for the team
With so many ideas being discussed, confusion started brewing within our team about current and future priorities. My solution was to visualize the product & page goals on a whiteboard so the team could easily reference them during daily stand-up meetings. This created transparency, curiosity and excitement within our team and across the organization about what we were building.
Product & page goals displayed on whiteboard for daily team alignment.
My design process
To increase the speed of delivery, I created medium-fidelity wireframes for all pages in the preview and publishing processes to get feedback from users. Although design aesthetics was not a priority for this internal tool, I still advocated using components from our existing Design System since it would increase efficiency and help save development time.
Offer preview enabled Client Services users to preview files without the fear of overriding live campaign data
Feedback displayed about outstanding issues for a campaign
The impact
Publishing time for offers reduced from over three months to just under five business days! Our successful pilot with Rexall opened up opportunities to collaborate with Sobeys, creating even more value for our AIR MILES collectors and generating excitement in the marketplace.
Additionally, we gained valuable insights on the performance of loaded versus redeemed offers, with real-time data that we shared with our partners to inform future campaigns.
Learnings
• Assume nothing. It's not helpful to design an idealistic "Bentley" experience when your users actually need a motorcycle with a sidecar. Conduct user interviews first to understand their needs and avoid wasting time on the wrong approach.
• UX artifacts are only valuable if the team can easily access and reference them.