Secondary Research
Upon receiving the project brief from stakeholders, we sought to gain a basic overview of the problems users are encountering by conducting secondary research into user feedback from App Store/Google Play (36 reviews), along with stakeholder interviews.
Similar key pain points emerged from both sources, including:
Lack of user understanding 🔍
The primary reason users download and use the app is only for point accumulation, resulting in low retention and minimal exploration of other features.
Not user friendly
The app is not engaging enough for customers to remember to use it.
Design friction
The app's current design makes it hard for users to accumulate and use points, lowering satisfaction and reducing continued usage.
To guide our design process, the PM from PWG raised 3 objectives for us to tackle, including …
UX Audit
Based on 10 Usability Heuristics, we evaluated and conducted a comprehensive analysis of the current VIP Gifts app interfaces to identify design issues and usability concerns.
Rough work of our UX audit
User Interviews
We further conducted user interviews to validate the insights and assumptions we gained from desk research, stakeholder interviews, and heuristic evaluation.
Audience
6 users
Experimental group: Customers who have used the app but have deleted it.
Control group: Customers who frequently make purchases and accumulate points.
Lots of sticky notes during our open coding session
Key Insights
Users installed the app primarily for tracking earned points and browsing for ads and banners to find relevant promotions.
Users faced challenges with the point redemption process due to its inconsistent interfaces.
Usability Testing
Next, we conducted tests with 5 first-time and infrequent users to better understand their behaviors and emotions. We then organized the insights into empathy maps to gain a comprehensive view of the pain points users are experiencing.
Goals
Explorative: Evaluate which features grab users' attention the most.
Start-to-end: To validate the assumption from previous research that users lack motivation to use the app because it is not easy to check accumulated points from previous purchases, and they don't understand how to use points → leading to frustration and a lack of trust in the system.
Preview of our Empathy Map
Key Insights
Users desired a simpler, more concise explanation of points accumulation and redemption.
Users are confused by the layout of the homepage.
Users skipped banner ads, preferring categorized deals to find relevant offers.
Users prefer other loyalty apps, since they don't find values in using MWG's app.
Research Synthesis
Drawing from the raw feedback gathered during previous internal and external research, I led the team to carry out several exercises to synthesize the data, identify key insights, and convert them into valuable ideas to guide our next design process. Throughout the process, I also sought feedback from my design mentors to make sure we are on the right track.
Click through the slides to see each filtering round!