Reward Rules Redesign

Data Gathering/Analysis, UX Research, UX Design, UI Design + Component Library (Design System), Usability Testing

Problem Statement

How might we simplify the process of creating reward rules and make it more 'self-serve'?

Team

CEO (also handling the Product), CS Manager, 2 Developers, Sole Designer (me)

Overview

Referral Rock is a referral marketing SaaS product. Currently there is an onboarding wizard that takes the users (marketing managers) through all the necessary options to help them create and launch a referral program/campaign.

One area that is a bit confusing is setting up Reward Rules as there are basic options, advanced options, and dependencies on other items to configure outside of a program reward rule.

Users create a reward rule at the program/campaign level, and then connect it to the payouts that are set up at the account level (i.e. the payouts that are set up can be applied to multiple programs/campaign).

I was the Sole Designer for this project and was assigned the task of simplifying the process of creating reward rules on their existing platform so that it becomes 'self-serve' for the users and they finish the task themselves instead of calling up the support team.

Insights from the CS team

I also spoke to the Customer Success Manager to get more insights about who the platform users were and what were their pain points and what % of users were facing these problems.

Reward Options are not very clear

- About 75% users needed help to set up Reward Rules.
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- The setup is very wordy and overwhelming for the customers. Most customers typically wait until they get on the phone with a customer support team member in order to go through the setup, or they do it themselves and they do it incorrectly (go ahead with default settings).
- Confusion about how those options would work as rewards. Eg: No details added about Email, Manual rewards.

Tiered Rewards are confusing and often missed

- About 50% ended up using Tiered rewards when a suggestion was made by a CS team member.
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- There was a lot of confusion because of the need to edit different sections and options within the Member Reward Rule module (eg: Payouts, Tiered rewards).
- It was not intuitive at all to go from one setting to another.

Setting up Payouts (adding funds) is unclear

- How to tie a reward rule to a Payout (and how to set up payouts)?
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- Majority of the time, Reward Rules are set up and then people would forget to set up the payout, or aren't sure where to set it up.
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- For example, the users choose Gift cards, and to add funds to issue those gift cards they need to goto Settings > Payouts > Manage Gift Cards > Add Funds

This is what the 'Before' interaction looked like:

User Personas

Based on my conversations with the CS team and their conversations with their users, I got to know there were 2 types of users - small business owners (using this tool as a means of "word-of-mouth" marketing) and marketing managers (who are looking for something that they can "set it and forget it"). I decided to focus on these 2 user personas and created user goals to inform my design to meet the needs of both these users.

Jenny, 40 - Small businesses owner, sells her products in-store and online
Goals
- Relies heavily on "word-of-mouth" as an effective marketing tool
- Run occasional/seasonal campaigns (by using rewards like coupons etc.) to promote her business
- Get maximum ROI for minimum investment
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Frustrations
- Does not have a team of people to handle marketing for her products
- Needs something easy to use/easy to set up
- Not very tech-savvy
- Gets overwhelmed by clunky, complex workflows - needs guidance to accomplish complex tasks
- Not aware of multiple available options to promote her business
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William, 35 - Marketing Manager for a SME
Goals
- Fairly tech savvy, so always looking for tools that would help him save time ("set it and forget it")
- Not rely too much on customer support teams to create marketing campaigns
- Get maximum ROI for his investment

Frustrations
- Handle multiple marketing tools for different marketing campaigns
- Lack of time /busy schedule
- Needs something easy to use/easy to set up
- Finds most of the tools are time consuming and requiring support to be able to get maximum output

User Goals / User Stories

As a user, I should be able to select different rewards (like Gift Cards, Paypal, etc.) and setup the reward rules correctly so I don't have to rely on customer support help and save time.

As a user, I should be able to set up different levels of rewards (tiered rewards) that are offered as a part of the reward rule setup, in order to increase the success rate (ROI) of my marketing campaigns.

As a user, I should be able to view the advanced settings easily in order to customize my rewards setup so that I don't have to rely on documentation/CS team and save time.

As a user, I should be able to setup funds, add coupons etc. so that I'm able to payout the rewards for my customers.

No items found.

Initial Solution/First Pass

I decided to create a wizard as a first pass, so that the user is always able to see all steps of reward rule creation. Instead of using too much text, I kept it super simple so users can easily comprehend and proceed ahead. The payouts setting was not a part of the initial scope, so I left out connecting the payout settings in the initial wireframes.

View Whiteboard

Initial Solution (Wireframes)

From the sketches, I decided to create wireframes to test it out with the users. The tasks focussed on the users creating the reward rules, adding tiered rewards, and connecting the reward rules <> payouts.

View Prototype

Time for usability testing...

Once the initial wireframes were created, I decided to do a quick usability testing with 5 participants focussing on the tasks pertaining to reward rule creation, creating a tiered reward and accessing the payouts page from the reward rules listing page.

What worked

Users could figure out how to setup payouts from the reward rule listings

Users could add tiered rewards from the wizard, because the text was reduced to read like a sentence.

Users could figure how how to disable/enable (activate) reward rules

Users could figure out the multiple steps and conditions required to setup the reward rules without relying on the CS team

What could be improved

All the options were not upfront as they were still split into 3 steps

At the last step of the wizard, payout methods actually meant the reward type was a bit confusing (80% users)

The wizard was still very text-heavy and optional items were not clearly separated out

Final Solution

After a couple of iterations and further discussions/reviews with the Product Owner/CEO and the CS manager, I decided to follow an accordion design instead of the wizard and reuse the existing accordion modules in the product that were using this type of interaction.
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We decided to simplify it more and came up with a solution to make all reward conditions read like a sentence and avoid using complicated language.

I came up with the alternate screens which were then iterated upon (after initial user feedback) and the final result is presented here. This also paved the way for incorporating some settings from the Payouts into the Reward Rules and prevented the user from not being able to connect Rewards <> Payouts.

High-fidelity UI

I then created high-fidelity prototypes in Figma after the wireframes were finalized

View Prototype

Next Steps

Rework on 'Tiered Rewards' and conduct user testing for Payouts to ensure that the users understand what they need to do next viz., add funds, add coupons, or setup email etc.

Impact (Success Metrics)

Increase in Task Completion rates (80%) + Decrease in errors (80%) for rewards created (based on second usability testing conducted again with 5 participants)

Decrease in CS calls/tickets for Reward Rules Setup
After the feature went live, there has been a significant reduction in the CS calls/tickets created for reward rules.