Loyalty expiry feature

Our team was responsible for POS Loyalty program development. We started off by talking to our customers. We conducted many user interviews, discussing with customers their experience with the Loyalty Program, their goals, motives and challenges.
After analysing the results of the interviews, one topic attracted our attention: many users shared their concerns about Loyalty Program liability and its effect on their business. They communicated the need to control the amount of Loyalty in circulation, to manage Loyalty liability.

I mapped the current user journeys and main workarounds merchants used to solve for the liability control issue. Based on these journeys, I formulated How Might We (HMW) statements. After sessions with the Product Manager, stakeholders and design team, we had a set of finalised HMW statements to address the problem of loyalty liability.
I followed with the intended user journeys. They helped to understand how the solution could work and what flexibility users might need to manage liability effectively.

We knew that the problem can be solved by introducing loyalty expiry, this solution was very prominent. The challenge was to determine the expiry type. I carried out a comparative analysis of three loyalty expiry types. Several criteria were selected to compare the expiry methods, such as “How many merchants can benefit from this method?”, “For how many merchants will it be sufficient?” “How will it influence customers behavior?”, “How easy is it to understand for customers?” “How feasible is it for our dev team?” etc. Taking into account all these considerations, one method seemed to be a winner.
To verify our choice of expiry method, we conducted an email survey with the users. We also wanted to get more information about expiry parameters our merchants would need to consider for their business model and customer’s life-cycle.
The survey results were very encouraging. They confirmed our choice and proved that our vision of the problem and its solution reflected the user’s needs. Moreover, the reasons our users gave to support their choice were very insightful. They helped us better understand the way merchants view Loyalty, their motives and goals.

The fist step of solution design involved a close cooperation with the development team, during which we evaluated the feasibility of different solution options, defined and mapped the use cases.
The user flow was mapped to define the main user steps and information needed on each step. Collaboration with the content designer was essential and we had several sessions during design phase. The design team gave me a great feedback on the flow as well.

After considering different design system elements, the choice was made to use segment controller as a expiry type selector. Panels with titles and copy give the real estate to present and clearly define the two expiry options. Progressive disclosure of further information and actions needed to set the expiry feature helped to structure information and to make the flow more intuitive and less-error prone.

The expiry feature was launched in May 2023, and had a very good adoption rate. It allowed to expire more than $0.5 M in Loyalty dollars during first 3 months of its operation.

To organize the user interview for this project, I gave our team members a brief introduction to Dovetail. We registered, arranged, transcribed, and tagged the interviews in Dovetail. Using this software, we were able to define the most commonly cited difficulties and issues and conduct an effective analysis of the findings.
Dovetail provides excellent tools and raises the bar for customer research considerably. Since we first used Dovetail, it had become a “must have“ research tool for our team.