We were challenged to innovate the member’s account experience—defined as anything “post-purchase,” including ranging from managing and recieving their rewards, viewing their past activity, setting their account preferences, or receiving transactional emails.
As Product Design Lead, I was responsible for the holistic audit, user research, userflows, visual design, and design-to-dev handoff. I partnered with a Product Lead, a Development Lead and a team of engineers for iOS, Android, and web.
Workshop Facilitating
Ecosystem Mapping
User Research
Stakeholder Alignment
I try to lead every project along the traditional “research, design, validate, iterate” approach. However, I also believe that each project has its own unique situation that requires the traditional framework to be customized to fit. This project followed the following general framework:
Define the Problem
With my product management co-lead, we led a Design Sprint to uncover the core problem in the post-purchase landscape.
Audit the User Experience
I then completed an audit of the UX landscape across platforms and internal tools to sequence the work needed.
Design & Validate
Finally, I conducted user studies and competitive research to test my hypotheses and design concepts before recommending changes.
With my Product Management partner, I co-led a multi-day design sprint with the goal of aligning the team around a problem that balanced user and business needs. The goal was to create a proof of concept—backed by user feedback and business analytics—to present to the leadership to productionize for the millions of Rakuten members.
I inherited the account experience as Product Design Lead. Before beginning any work I gained my footing by interviewing existing and historical stakeholders, reviewing past and existing features informing the user experience, and conducting baseline user studies. I found 3 core areas to focus efforts.
Inconsistency Across Platforms
There was a different experience visually and structurally on each platform.
UX Didn't Educate Users Properly
The existing experience was disjointed, preventing a basic understanding of the program.
Redundancy & Internal Bias
The disjointed experience made sense if you had a grasp of how the backend worked. The challenge was to transform the experience with a user-centered design.
Inconsistent information architecture and UI across screens created a bumpy transition across the product ecosystem and tripled the design, development and QA effort.
These three diagrams with screenshots show the disparity of UI components, styles, and information architecture across web, iOS, and Android for a single user’s account.
I conducted a series of card sorts over 30 new and existing users to suss out the best organization of all the pages and features available in the account.
Our customer satisfaction tool, Forsee, showed that “Cash Back Management” was the highest impact area to focus on improvements on.
Additionally, I interviewed Member Services stakeholders and learned that roughly 20% of customer service tickets were filed before the order was reported by the store. Technically, nothing was wrong with these orders—they just needed a little more time to complete—but these users felt compelled to complain.
These two data points taken together painted a picture of the user’s distrust in the product experience.
Most people knew what they were looking for and only went to the page that they first discovered and didn’t know about the other pages that housed the info they didn’t see. Someone said “they’re all the same kinda page, but with each different information.”
One of the challenges of this project was convincing stakeholders to invest in these pages—they were some of the oldest pages in the entire experience and contained legacy infrustructure.
I created a presentation that I then took on an internal roadshow to advocate for the end-user among stakeholders.
I appealed to stakeholders’ sense of responsibility to the user by invoking the customer’s trust in our product.
And I appealed to their ambitions for the future of the product by aligning the improved experience with key competitors in our growth market.
The consolidation of pages and their underlying technology would have taken months to complete.
I compromised speed-to-market of the ideal experience for a longer, phased approach. The first phase would simply reorganize existing pages in a new linking structure. The second phase would consolidate all of those pages’ functionality for the final vision.
Mocks shown here are on the mobile breakpoint. The new design was made to be responsive across desktop and mobile-web.
Unfortunately the project was deprioritized due to a lack of engineering resources. Looking back, there are some things I would do differently if given the opportunity.
Collaborate With Stakeholders to Build a Stronger Business Case
I presented my project plan to almost a dozen leaders individually across the entire org. During that process I learned about each leaders' strategic initiatives that could have benefitted from the updated design that I wasn't privy to prior to our meeting.
I learned that I could have shopped my plan to these leaders earlier on and asked more directly for their support to build a business case to keep the feature on the roadmap.
Create a More Gradual Sequencing Plan
I should have anticipated the executives' apprehension around the development estimates.
I thought that my sequencing plan balanced dev time and feature improvement. I should have collaborated more with the dev lead to create another option that prioritized speed-to-market.
Member Support Redesign
Address Capture Initiative