Enhancing the Loyalty App for Vietnam's No.1 multi-category retail platform: How can we boost Monthly Active Users (MAU) and keep users engaged?
Date
August 2024
Product Designer
Role
User Research, Usability Testing, Product Strategy, Interaction Design, Visual Design, Storyboarding
Company
3 Product Designers (including me)
About MWG and VIP Gifts Loyalty App
Quà Tặng VIP (VIP Gifts) is a Loyalty App through which the retail corporation MWG implements its vision of enhancing customer experience and satisfaction when shopping on its omni-channel system. On the VIP Gifts app, customers can:
Earn points for every purchase
Convert points into money
Manage and track orders, check warranty information and product maintenance
Access services such as scheduling cleaning appointments, finding nearby stores, etc.
The Solution
The Demo (Sneakpeak 👀)
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How did I get there? Let's…
Break down the problem space
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From the business' POV
📉 Market Analysis
The Vietnamese retail sector is facing an unprecedented challenge, as consumer demand continues to decline in the beginning of 2024.
This signals a stagnation phase in Vietnam's retail market, particularly indicating a decline in in-store traffic and customer engagement with sales services.
💎 What does this mean for UX?
This trend underscores the need for MWG to prioritize enhancing the in-person omnichannel shopping experience. As a result, the app serves as a strategic byproduct that supports this broader business goal rather than being the primary focus. UX must adopt a product mindset, ensuring that design decisions align with business objectives and drive measurable impact within existing resource constraints.
🗂️ Product Lifecycle Analysis
From the users' POV
Users struggle to see values in the loyalty program due to the confusion with point accumulation and redemption processes. They often abandoning the app mid-way due to unclear instructions and cluttered interfaces.
How did I validate this user problem?
Secondary Research
Heuristic Evaluations
Stakeholder (PM) Interview
Competitor Analysis
Qualitative Research
In-depth User Interviews
Usability Testing
⭐️ Considering the business constraint of low UX maturity, I focus on high-impact, low-effort solutions, And to do that, I and the team went through four filtering rounds to synthesize the data:
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Problems defined, let's get down to…
Designing
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Simplified Visual Language
Due to the limited bandwidth for accessing the internal design system, I proposed a simplified design library based on the branding guidelines. This approach allowed for a clean and functional visual consistency while working with limited resources.
Key Exploration
I went through many iterations based on user research, feedback from the team, and the design mentor. For example, my first challenge was redesigning the homepage’s top bar to better communicate essential information. This included displaying the user’s total points, a personal QR code for point redemption, and an intuitive indicator for understanding point accumulation.
I explored two design options to convey the rules for accumulating points to users:
I did a rapid testing and went with option 2 since discoverability is critical for user understanding about point accumulation rules.
Final solution
Introducing the enhanced UX improvements
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Learning from "Understanding the Micro, Meso, and Macro Worlds of User Experience" by Kevin Corti, PhD - UX Research at Google, I proposed UX solutions across 3 levels: Micro, Meso, and Macro. This approach ensures a systematic UX approach where every design interaction contributes meaningfully to the larger user experience ecosystem, no matter how small or big.
Micro
✨ The Micro World of UX comprises moment-by-moment experiences: direct sensory and motor phenomena, tasks, tools, and decision-making moments users encounter when using a product to accomplish lower-order goals.
OPTIMIZED HOMEPAGE LAYOUT
The optimized homepage now features a more streamlined top bar with increased privacy, while adding a "Stores Near You" button for quick access. Additionally, banners have been categorized by brands for easier access, making it easier to find relevant offers.
PREVIOUS SOLUTION
The old design had an unintuitive top bar. Users had to go through many steps to find "Stores Near You" and locate brand-specific promotions, increasing confusion.
Meso
✨ The Meso World of UX consists of user journeys: sequences of lower-order goals that form pathways toward higher-order goals.
CLEAR POINT ACCUMULATION INFORMATION
By clicking the 'See details' button of the top bar with users' points displayed, the user can see a detailed page about point accumulation categorized by brands, with each brand having specific rules. A new "How to Earn Points" and "Points History" buttons have been added, providing transparency on earning and tracking points.
PREVIOUS SOLUTION
Users struggle to understand how points are accumulated and what benefits they can receive. The point accumulation details are buried within cluttered promotional banners, making it difficult to find and understand the rewards system.
New flow improvements
Macro
✨ The Macro World of UX is the realm of user-product relationships: how users experience successive user journeys and how user segments orient toward products longitudinally.
TIERED LOYALTY PROGRAM
Customers can advance from Silver to Platinum status by reaching specific spending milestones, with each tier offering increasing benefits such as exclusive offers from stores within the MWG network. As customers move up the tiers by making frequent purchases, they unlock more valuable rewards and privileges.
OPPORTUNITY
By introducing a tiered loyalty program across the MWG ecosystem, we can directly address the business goal of improving MAU. Competitors already offer loyalty programs, and users have mentioned their interest in such features. Since we currently do not provide this, it presents a clear opportunity to enhance long-term user retention and brand partnerships through rewards and exclusive benefits.
Storyboard of our proposed macro feature
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If we had more time…
Next steps and metrics I aim to measure
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More Usability Testing
Consider A/B testing on the micro design changes.
Metric #1: Click-through Rate
To assess usability at the interaction level.
Metric #2: Monthly Active Users (MAU) Rate
To evaluate user growth at a product level, based on my hypothesis that improved usability will correlate with increased user engagement.
Metric #3: Customer Support Requests
While the other two are direct measurements, this one is an indirect one that aims to understand friction points in the user experience
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After one and a half month, I…
Reflect back on the progress and learn …
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Designing with users and business in mind
During a short sprint, I learned to approach design decisions from multiple perspectives, including user experience, business goals, and technical feasibility. This holistic approach ensures that the product addresses user needs and aligns with broader business objectives and market positioning.
Applying 3M framework for product strategy proposal
The most valuable insight I gained is how to propose impactful UX solutions across three levels: Micro, Meso, and Macro (3M framework). One critical lesson I’ve learned is that increasing clarity and reducing risk as much as possible should be prioritized when dealing with ambiguity. This often involves breaking down complex problems through primary research and idea validation to guide effective decision-making.
Conducting effective UX research
Establishing clear goals and methodologies in a research plan is essential for effectively synthesizing findings and ensuring that insights align with the research purpose. By conducting pilot sessions with the team before engaging with real users, I learned to refine the right questions to ask and develop an unbiased question order that encourages genuine responses from users.
