Customer Rewards App

ux/ui  •  research  •  short-term personal project

Overview
This "Customer Rewards App" project has been a short-term intensive project since December of 2022. It is based on a niche concept to improve the process of sharing recommendations for establishments. We're aiming to create an app that enhances the way customers send / receive item-based recommendations within their network with two short months. 

Role
Product Designer (Customer-facing Side)
As the sole product designer on the customer-facing side, I've been working closely with our product manager and business-facing product designer. Given the nature of this short-term passion project, I've been working efficiently to produce deliverables in a fast-paced and collaborative work environment. I led weekly internal presentations and participated in working sessions. 

How Can We Improve the Way We Send / Receive Recommendations?
A Better Way to Recommend Items / Places / Establishments to Each Other. 

Ideation
Eating out is such a big part of our day-to-day lives, especially in the city. It’s not only a way one spends quality time with their friends, significant others, families, and coworkers, but also a way one keeps up with their busy schedules. In a city with a big dining-out culture like New York City, everyone’s always trying to find new places to eat and to get better deals. You often hear about places from your friends and acquaintances and read about the specials they have on social media and online articles. 

This idea came from our own experiences as customers and a small business owner. The current process of recommending places to others is *not* as efficient as it could be. 

Let's imagine you recently received a recommendation for a restaurant from your friend, Nick. While you were out and about with Nick, he recommended a restaurant. It sounded super interesting to you, so you wrote it down in your notes on your phone and proceeded with the rest of the day. A few days go by and you’re trying to figure out where to grab a bite. You remember that Nick had recommended you a place, but somehow that note is missing from your phone. You search everywhere—text messages, google maps, google searches. With no luck, you text Nick asking the same question and await his response.

We realized that a small business owner experiences a similar frustration from the other side. As a restaurant owner or worker, you meet hundreds of new faces every day. Some are friendly, some are mean, and most of them just come and go. While you may recognize some faces occasionally, you can rarely put a face to a name. More often than not, an eager customer comes in saying she got a great recommendation from her friend, Nick. She’s looking at you expecting you to remember, but you have a million vague faces popping up in your head. You are grateful for the recommendation and you wish you could thank him, but you don't have a convenient way to do so.

Research
With this idea and our collective experience in mind, we wondered if there was a way to improve this process for everyone involved—the new customer, recommender, and business owner. We outlined currently available methods to receive / send / find recommendations and interviewed three restaurant business owners and five customers in their 20s-30s to collect their feedback.

What are the main benefits and problems with these methods? What are the areas for improvement?

Some Quotes from Interview Sessions

“When I’m looking up a place, I want to see pictures of food, not just a menu.”

“Yelp reviews seem too biased and they don’t feel trustworthy.” 

“When you receive a recommendation or recommendations, it’s hard to catalog them.”

“I wish there was a way I could reward the customer for recommending this place..."

Based on our discussions, we found that social media and word of mouth are the most common ways for people to send / receive / share recommendation information. Yet, the struggles were the same. Given our short timeline for the project, I conducted a lean persona development and mapped out the current user journey for three types of people involved in this scenario— the recommender Nick M, the new customer, Jess D, and the owner, Will.

Define

Defining the Objectives
Based on our research and discovery, we defined our objectives and prioritized them into two groups. The MAIN objective, which serves as the ultimate goal for our product and secondary objectives that further support and enhance the product.

Market / Competitor Research
To better position our niche concept and differentiate our product, I conducted market / competitor research to identify pros and cons of each platform.

Develop & Ideate

Then, we moved on to sketching out our ideas and creating an initial user flow to see the big interaction flow for both a new customer and a returning customer. During our working session, we kept asking the following questions: Is the process complete? How does this particular flow tie into another flow? Are we skipping a step? What should be modified? What is the user’s main goal here? What is the next move? How does this connect? 

After our initial flow, I continued to make iterations and updated the sitemap to provide the most efficient and seamless experience for the users.

In Progress: Wireframing

More Updates to Follow!
Due to our short timeline, I quickly started working on our low-fi to mid-fi wireframes. As this is an ongoing project, I’m still iterating on the wireframes, while having review sessions with the product manager and business-facing product designer. It’s been extremely helpful to prototype as we go as it allows us to physically interact with the flow of the app and interact with it from a user’s perspective. I’m now preparing to make the final round of edits before we conduct user testing and usability testing with potential users.

Come back later for more updates! In the meantime, enjoy this gif I made of our progress so far.