Member Price

Role: Lead UX Designer

Duration: 1 month

The problem

"How might we create a seamless member pricing experience across our digital channels to entice customers to join the Everyday Rewards program and get more value our of their shop during inflation?"

With customers increasingly focused on obtaining more value out of their shop with inflation, the business has a strong ambition to grow the Everyday Rewards (Woolworths loyalty program) member base and provide more offers to customers through member only pricing on grocery products. Everyday Rewards saw a reduction of NPS of more than 20% due to recent changes in the subscription program. To both provide more value and help increase NPS score, senior leadership at Woolworths wanted to implement member pricing across online and physical stores. Phase 1 was released with member price promotions allowing customers to "buy more and save more," (i.e. if they buy 3 items, they receive a discount).

In order to provide more value to members, the business wanted to add to the types of member price promotions customers can receive. Phase 2 involved releasing a new promotion - member only pricing. This means if a customer is a Everyday Rewards member they are able to receive a discount on an item. The business had the ambition to:

Increase scan rate from 50% to 60%
Grow active members from 8.2m to 9.5m

I was co-lead on the project looking after the overall end-to-end customer experience primarily across web but also across app. The project involved over 80+ stakeholders and required rapid delivery within a month due to market sensitivity.

Starting with the basics

Getting the scope right

There were many challenges of a project that was assembled rapidly. There was lack of information about KPIs, project objectives. There was also many assumptions made from phase 1 that was carried over into phase 2. While not a typical designer responsibility, I created a strategy analysis board to capture questions and collaborated with key program stakeholders to answer questions.
With tight deadlines, our team had to be strategic about what research was conducted. Using a research prioritisation framework, I helped create clarity around areas of research that are critical to be conducted before launch
Furthermore, I pushed the program lead to set up an initial QA session with stakeholders in the program to ask any questions about scope. I collated over 50 questions to request information about scope and success measures

Once the scope was clear, I set up a session with product managers (10) to help define success metrics for the program from a customer and business perspective. I also set up the workshop to discuss the approach for phase 2. Again, this was not a typical designer responsibility, but was taken on due to time constraints and a need for structure that was lacking in the program.

Overall goal:

Improve value perception of Everyday Rewards program using member pricing as an enticement to shop and return again. Once customers are signed up to Everyday Rewards, we know they are likely to be stickier and more profitable customers

Customer goals:

Ensure clear comprehension of member pricing to increase likelihood of customers returning and increasing chances of customer purchasing member priced products
Increase perceived value in card linking and registration to obtain member pricing
Increase the find-ability and discoverability of member priced offers and information about the program across WOW and Rewards channels

Business goals:

Demonstrate value of being a member of loyalty program
Increase scan rate and card linkage % online
Grow Everyday Rewards active members
Make 1 month launch date

How we did it

Rapid research and design

Given the timeframe of the project, our team had to rapidly undertake research and move into design and development phase very quickly. Typically this process would take 3 months, however, our team completed this process in <1 month. Due to tight timelines, our team had to be very strategic about what research was conducted and had to run very lean testing.

Benchmarking and Competitor Analysis

I collaborated with other designers to look at competitor analysis across 12 different competitors to understand key trends and themes across how member pricing was implemented
I collaborated with other designers to look at various guidelines on benchmarking website Baymard to understand best practise implementation of loyalty membership and pricing across different touchpoints in the customer journey
My role was to collate information and synthesise the results and present back findings to stakeholders

Key takeaways:

Reinforce member savings across the whole customer journey and make sure it's contextually relevant to the different shopping journeys of existing vs new members (for example, if member, showcase savings and reinforce value of being a member; if non-member reinforce lost savings and offer incentives to sign-up)
Reduce barriers to sign-up by providing instant gratification for sign-up (e.g. monetary rewards, quick sign-up process)
Increase findability and discoverability of information about the program and member pricing to increase learning about program and encourage sign-up

Competitor Analysis

Due to time constraints in phase 1, there was no customer testing completed on initial designs released. To understand gaps in customer experience for improvement in phase 2, I tested the existing experience across the entire end-to-end journey with 6 non-rewards customers. This helped identify areas of improvement for phase 2.

Key takeaways:

Woolworths has multiple membership programs and customers weren't clear about which program "member pricing" was referring to. This was specifically the case for non-rewards members who were the key target for the initiative
Non-members found it difficult to redeem offers. There wasn't enough clear sign-posting, entry points or information on how to redeem member pricing. This presented a lost opportunity for conversion.
Members wanted clear signifiers to reinforce savings and reinforce the benefits of being a rewards member

Customer testing

To ensure that member pricing was a cohesive journey, in collaboration with another designer, I designed two journeys to capture the end-to-end journey of a non-rewards and rewards member from acquisition to post-purchase journeys. The mapping of these journeys was critical in identifying current state gaps and opportunities for improvement. To help this output be more visual and speak to more technical stakeholders in future workshops, we mocked up concepts for future state opportunities across every touchpoint.

E2E customer journey and opportunity identification

There was a total of 2 workshops run with over 80+ stakeholders across the business. The first workshop was a run through of the research and end-to-end journey impacts to help stakeholders understand and empathise with customer pain points and receive buy-in to opportunity improvements across the whole journey rather than making isolated changes to the product tile (outcome of phase 1, leading to broken customer journey).

The second workshop aimed to prioritise key opportunities identified and help PMs use the MOSCOW framework to prioritise what opportunities will be implemented for phase 2. I created a visual board with requirements and scenarios for consideration to help drive prioritisation conversations. Although initially, stakeholders only wanted to just uplift the tile, through this workshop we were able to prioritise and scope in many critical customer experiences that would have otherwise been de-prioritised. These are live on the website today and include:

Uplifting app product tiles to display middle messaging that is consistent with web
Creating a home to allow customers to both find member price items and learn about member price items
Create entry points in the navigation to find member priced items
Uplift the cart across web and app to reinforce savings for members and highlight missed offers for non-members to increase likelihood of conversion
Separate out member priced offers in the promotions hub (initially it was mixed in with other promotions and didn't have clear section)
Accessibility uplift on product tile sticker (increase size and change styling) to make it more legible across web and app channels

Workshops

Parallel to the service mapping, working together with a UI designer, we had a rapid ideation session where we brainstormed different ways to represent "member price" and "non-member price" on the product tile while keeping the following principles in mind:

Due to the tight deadlines for both design and development, components explored need to leverage existing design components in design system
Use visual signifiers (colour, borders, weighting) to bring attention and awareness to member price while providing equal weight to non-member price
Design for phase 2 needs to share a consistent visual look a feel to designs in phase 1 (the different promotion mechanics need to visually be consistent and appear to belong to one family of promotions)
Designs needs to work across web and app, across all touchpoints

Based on these principles and research conducted, we began to narrow down potential designs for product tiles.

Ideation

The outcome

Hi-Fi design and development

Final designs

I collaborated with a UI designer and UX/UI designers who own different parts of the remit to finalise designs across the entire end-to-end journey for web and app. Examples of live work are below.

Although this was outside of the remit of my responsibility, I made sure to collaborate with search, checkout, navigation and rewards teams to implement features such as navigational pathways, creating a home for rewards, aligning on cart experience. I helped design the future state designs across different areas in collaboration with designers who own these areas to enable stakeholders to visualise concepts easily for technical feasibility discussions.

Legal, brand and commercial alignment

There were many workshops and conversations with legal, brand and marketing to land on the final design. I helped create documentation to help align and make decisions to progress with design. In addition, I created a risk document to record the final experience design decisions and where there were gaps for improvement in future designs. This document helped align senior stakeholders on the risks of not scoping in key features critical to enabling the member price experience across the end-to-end journey

Outcomes

Increased active users. Went from 8.39M to 8.57M active members (increase of 2%, 0.18M customers)
15k new/re-activated members
No online negative VOC sentiments related to redeeming member price products across digital channels. This was positive as customers didn't have complaints about redeeming and finding member price offers online

Next Steps and Learnings

Importance of documenting risks and communicating impacts of sub-par customer experiences to the business. This enabled us to scope in core features key to providing a seamless online journey across platforms
Learning to tailor workshops and stakeholder sessions to the needs of stakeholders (i.e. some stakeholders need visual outputs to respond better to information, others want data and slide packs)