The industry struggles with fund management, communicating with retailers and meeting consumer expectations for personalized shopping experiences and competitive pricing due to inadequate commercial marketing and loyalty programs.

Context

Challenge

GOAL: To design a new B2B platform to increase the loyalty of small retailers to Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) brands, without creating conflict amongst distribution channels.

Design Process

Design artifact outcomes, such as empathy map, personas and value proposition canvases.

• Develop an intuitive and user-friendly interface that aligns with their professional mindset, focusing on ease of navigation and quick access to relevant offers;

• Prioritizing relevant cashback offers, segmented to align with POS preferences and purchasing patterns;

• Ensuring a seamless redemption process for earned cashback rewards to encourage future engagement and usage;

• Redemption/delivery of products at the nearest distributors (geolocation).

Lessons

• This project challenged me to know more about a lot of subjects like cashback business model variety, industry issues and POS issues and how they works.

• Journey maps uncover a lot of helpful insights. Sometimes this is distracting so I benefited from synthesizing these insights and only spotlighting one main insight. Sort of like picking my battle: focusing work with POS needs!

Timeframe

My Role

Jan to May 2021

Research & Design

Core Team

Tradeback

Costumer

1 Product Manager 3 designers

Numbers: Over 20 in-depth interviews.

Audience: the industry, POS, distributors, and vendors.

Working on key findings and insights to orient product development

Scope

Business Wins

• Delivery of the MVP for the B2B cashback solution, tested and validated with the end user.

• Creating the service blueprint proved instrumental in formulating the communication strategy (utilizing SMS and push notifications) for marketing the product, fostering collaboration with various departments within the company.

• Delivery of an affinity map of processes and activities, identifying the professionals involved in the process and their respective responsibilities, thereby providing a quality customer service.

Our results - Key features

Main User flow: after selecting one of the wallets, the user can view their balance and the timeframe for redeeming the cashback.

Digital Wallet

User flow: on the app's homepage, the user can discover a dedicated section displaying personalized products tailored to their preferences.

Personalized offers catalog

Invoice reader - Redeem cashback

Highlights: by collecting user feedback and identifying their needs, I advocated for making some changes to the visual wallet, rendering it more intuitive.

Secondaries User flows: inside the wallet, the user can read the offer rules and discover where can redeem the cashback.

Highlights: We decided to create personalized offers based on the information provided by the user in the profile preferences section, as well as on their purchase patterns.

Where doing shopping?

User flow: inside the wallet, users can utilize the 'Shopping' CTA (Call to Action) to locate the optimal redemption or product delivery option at the nearest distributors using geolocation.

Highlights: this approach assists users in finding desired products closer to them while also helping distributors and brands boost customer loyalty through cashback, compelling offers, and reduced search and purchase time.

User flow: after purchasing eligible products from Tradeback partners, users can scan the QR code on the receipt by simply clicking the 'Scan' CTA or by accessing it within the 'Tools' CTA, both located in the app menu.

Highlights: we offer features to assist users in keeping track of their cashback status, such as push notifications and a transaction history.

How did we start?

Based on the objective provided, I, together with the UX researcher and the UI Designer, decided to conducted a desk research to gain a comprehensive view of the cashback concept and its market applications.

Outcome of the desk research - Defining paths!

Our desk research has provided us with a good grasp of cashback solutions and their business model. However, now we need a better understanding of all the people involved in the chain. This will allow us to align technical decisions with user needs and test our assumptions.

We have two main actors in the chain: the Industry and the Point of Sale (POS). The Product Manager and the Sponsor provided us a background information about the industry's problem.

To help us learn more, we made a CSD (Certainties, Suppositions, and Doubts) Matrix.

What is next?

Our interview process, which was shaped by the insights from the CSD Matrix, has been quite focused. We developed a script primarily designed to address uncertainties and assumptions.

However, our primary goal was not only to resolve doubts but also to uncover the challenges, needs, and benefits experienced by the actors in the chain.

Through this process, we've gained valuable learnings. We've already been able to eliminate certain ideas that appeared to offer low value and came with high complexity and costs.

We started with in-depth desk research on the main players using cashback as a benefit for their customers. This study encompassed companies operating under the B2C, B2B, and B2B2C business models.

Examining each platform individually, we analyzed:

• the business model;

• how information was organized and accessed, and

• what interaction features were available to users.

Identifying strengths and weaknesses of each one in relation to the company's needs. We evaluated aspects such as:

• usability;

• customization;

• notification capabilities, and

• interaction with other tools.

After our interviews, we used special tools like empathy maps, personas, and a value proposition canvas to help us organize and understand what we learned. These tools were really helpful in making sense of all the information we got from the interviews.

Some key findings that guided our decision-making:

Point of Sale (POS)

• 100% of the respondents stated that they spend an average of more than 3 hours per day researching and purchasing products;

• 8 out of 10 respondents are familiar with technology and online shopping. Note: 100% have Wi-Fi in their stores;

• For use by the POS, Cashback needs to be relevant: with a wide mix of offers, personalized by segment, cashback on products they already purchase, and redemption for future purchases;

• 4 type of personas have been identified: Some POS are more streamlined, professional, and open-minded, while others are less so.

Industry

• It is tough to manage a complex indirect sales channel, which might even cause price wars;

• Having to rely on middlemen for using trade and commercial funds makes it hard to connect directly with stores. As a result, the industry lacks data about stores;

• Difficulties in fund execution often result in incentives not reaching the frontlines or failing to yield the intended impact, leading to diminished ROI, performance, and profitability;

• In short: trouble with fund management and not knowing much about stores leads to a weak strategy, fewer loyal customers, and less market share.

By using this matrix, we can dig deeper into how the chain works, talk to people, and understand their roles better. This will help us see how each person affects the whole system.

CSD Matrix - questionings

Certainties related to the industry's problem:

• Trade and commercial funds;

• Lack of visibility, management, control, and efficiency of the strategy;

• Lack of proximity with the point of sale (POS);

• Expectation of the industry's interest.

Questions regarding the point of sale (POS) issues:

• Have they heard of cashback? Do they understand what it is? Are they interested? What do they want to exchange for it? How to communicate it?

• Pains? Motivations?

• What are the different profiles? What is the most convincing value proposition?

Concept: App as a Central Solution:

• Does the POS have the technology to access the app?

• What other apps does it use? What do you like the most/least about these apps?

• Do they understand the concept and can they use the app?

Conceptual solution

Main principles:

The platform provides two perspectives, one for the industry (web dashboard) and the other for the POS (mobile app). We will exclusively concentrate our efforts on the app version, with a focus on the POS.

At this stage, we decided to create a persona cut and prioritize POS with a stronger affinity for technology, as they constitute a larger portion of our user base and demonstrate a potential quicker learning curve when using the platform.

Information Architecture:

Service Blueprint:

As we have scenarios that include multiple service-related offerings in our solution, we decided to make service blueprint diagram.

The goal of a service blueprint is to illustrate the relationship between various components within an organization, the processes involved, and how all of this, when combined, affects a customer's experience at every step of their journey with the customer service.

Another reason to choose this diagram is that it provides a clear picture or roadmap for employees on how to provide a specific service to customers. It also shows customers what they should expect when they interact with your brand at every step of the way.

As a result, we gave priority to the key touchpoints in the journey and included them in our MVP. These touchpoints include onboarding, earning cashback, and redeeming cashback.

We identified five major pathways that users could follow to accomplish the journey outlined in the service blueprint mentioned earlier.

Sketches:

Sketching enabled us to develop a preliminary understanding of essential screens and outline the required features.

Login

Home

Wallet

Rules

Scan

Shopping

UI Design

Here, we considered including a brief introduction to the app, explaining our business model to users.

Welcoming - Onboarding:

Main screens:

Here, I'm presenting the main screens created by our UI Designer. In designing them, he took into consideration all the insights we gained throughout this process while adhering to our core principles for conceptualizing the app.

Note: Tradeback is a Brazilian company, which is why the app was developed in Portuguese.

Usability Testing

Results

We conducted over 10 moderate tests with users to evaluate the information architecture, usability, and the functionality of the components.

We suggest three challenges:

• verify any wallet balance;

• discover special offers;

• finde cashback redemption locations.

• 4 out of 10 users had difficulty understanding that the wallet component was clickable, and it took them a long time to complete the challenge;

• All 10 users found the special offers section within an average of 4 seconds;

• 7 out of 10 users had difficulty understanding the task because the CTA name suggested a different action, according to their perspective.

Learnings & Takeways

Reflections

• Usability of the Wallet Component: The results suggest that improvements are needed in the design and user interface elements related to the wallet to enhance its intuitiveness and user-friendliness;

• Discoverability of Special Offers: The results indicate that this aspect of the user interface is well-designed and easy to find;

• CTA Clarity: This was the primary challenge! The CTA had the label 'Shopping,' which led some users to believe that we had an e-commerce section within the app. However, this is not the case. We only redirect users to the nearest partner, providing address and contact information or taking them to the partner's website.

Before

After

Before

After

We have made changes to the wallet's appearance, including design and colors, and we have added the total balance value of the wallets.

We have updated the copy from "Rules" to "How to earn" and from "Shopping" to "Where to redeem".

Thanks for reading!

Message me on Linkedin or email me at bastostlb@gmail.com

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