Creating a New Rewards System for 230 Million Customers
Role: UX / UI Designer Skills: User Experience, Wireframing, Competitive Analysis Time: 2022
What’s the opportunity?
Walmart struck a relationship with Ibotta in order to offer their customers a way to save on groceries and food items. Walmart is a Fortune 1 company. Ibotta is a company that offers discounts, rebates, and coupons to its customers. The trick was to bring the two companies together in a seamless experience, especially because Walmart’s UI will be the wrapper.
Walmart and Ibotta compete with other apps such as Rakuten, Honey, Capital One Rewards, etc., and it was important to do everything under one umbrella since customers already come to the store.
Situation & background
We on the design team needed to conduct a design workshop to understand the best, most UX friendly reward system. We wanted to know how to make Rewards clear, how to come up with a unified nomenclature, new UI components to demonstrate Rewards, ways to make it easy for customer to claim rewards, why it operated the way that it did.
Task
According to analytics performed by Walmart, “There has been a 54% decrease in coupon redemption over the last 5 years, while there was an increase in digital coupon transactions by 17% over the last year. Money savings tools drive 12% of customer choice an online offering.”
The task was to :
Introduce digital coupons to the Walmart customers by seamlessly combining Ibotta’s offering and integrating it into Walmart’s enviornment
Design a way to combine Ibotta’s offerings with Walmart digital / in-store experiences.
Create the full ecosystem for this new Rewards functionality including Rewards UI components, various states, interactions, etc.
Increase digital coupon redemption while learning about what the customers are buying and whether Rewards were motivating specific purchases over other
If this program were to succeed, Walmart would be able to not only offer savings to its customers, but also be able to keep all those savings within the Walmart ecosystem. Unlike cash-back that Ibotta offers which can be used within any store, this Digital Rewards program would give you savings that would be then only redeemed for Walmart purchases.
Ibotta offers will bring new families, and increase basket sizes while offering a rewarding experience that incentivizes continued engagement with Walmart.
Process
Design Workshop
I worked closely with the design team to run the design workshop. Stakeholder interviews, 1 week long workshop
The design workshop was a very intense, week-long experience broken apart into collecting ideas, theming, ideating, and putting together a prototype. My favorite part of the workshop was when senior designers wanted to understand what makes for a terrific rewards experience. All participants were asked to bring an item or describe an experience where they felt really rewarded by a company.
Some workshops participants described that they got free items from a store because they racked up a ton of points, others chimed in with similar experiences via credit cards that offered flight miles, and cash-back. Mine was a book of photographs from Henri Cartier-Bresson that I really fell in love with but my husband wasn’t able to find the book anywhere. He went to our favorite independent bookstore and they were able to find it for him. That to me was the finest demonstration of being rewarded for being a customer.
New components
With the help of a talented product manager, and over a dozen teams, we were able to to establish all of the various touchpoints that the Rewards function would interact with. Most of the time, the Rewards components would be integrated into the already existing infrastructure; the product tiles would simply be updated with a new flag alerting the customer to the Reward.
One of the challenges that kept occurring was the nomenclature as it pertained to this new offering. How can we create components, naming of the interactions, and patterns that were unique in what they offer to the customer, but still match aesthetically to the Walmart UI.
Impact
The Rewards collaboration is now live, designated at first for Walmart+ customers. The next steps is to monitor the adoption and to understand how to create a better user experience for the broad range of Walmart customers.
