Friction-filled to Frictionless for E-commerce - ZAP

UX Researcher

Product Designer

UI Designer

Figma

Problem

Merchants heavily relied on the support of ZAP's frontliners to navigate the loyalty platform

Prior to the launch of second version of the loyalty product, merchants could not independently navigate the platform and interfacing with either Accounts or Customer Support was a necessity to manage their branches on their behalf from sign-up to platform utilization.

This makes the whole process very labor-intensive and internally resource-heavy, bottlenecking in the acquisition stage of the funnel. Especially due to the fact that this new platform is positioned to be free to use, this concierge type of service of the paid version would be too costly for this other business model.

Result

Automating 5 features resulted in a 62.5% reduction in immediate human assistance

Features List

5 out of 8 existing features were redesigned to give merchants more autonomy, no longer waiting on company gatekeepers to start a step in the user journey, with 2 additional features created for further loyalty program customization.

It is also worth noting that although the first version is still more robust than its successor (e.g. sending coupons to non-registered customers and manual points adjustment), through prioritization, it was decided as a team to launch the product with only its core features at the first phase of the product, hence the exclusion from the feature count.

What's Loyalty anyway?

Loyalty is what the name suggests— turning one-time customers into repeat buyers and/or bigger spenders. In the context of ZAP, it means incentivizing customers to come back through several ways:

Loyalty Types

Loyalty has been a core product since the inception of ZAP and its existing platform is one of the organization's biggest sources of revenue at 70%. As a product, it has gone through several iterations and as it grew, so did its demands to serve its user base, ranging from big corporate to small-medium enterprises.

When the current loyalty platform's bottlenecks were in the way of generating potentially more profit, it needed more than just a facelift. Loyalty now needed a whole new build, down to its fundamental infrastructure.

How did we make it?

Alongside a product manager, 6 developers, and QA, we reorganized the features on the platform for easier navigation given the main user goals.

As a B2B2C company, this means building a multi-layer product that must satisfy these user groups:

The company

Our merchants - Our customers who own businesses

The customers - Our customers' customers

Information Architecture

We used the previous version’s features as light reference but took the liberty to reimagine the whole experience for the merchants with a combination of interviews from users and internal stakeholders and updated best practices from the industry.

User Flow - Account Creation

Hi-fi Design for Account Creation

Hi-fi Design for Cashback Setup

Hi-fi Design for Customer Profile

Hi-fi Design for Transactions History & Approval

Hi-fi for desktop, tablet, and mobile

Learnings and Opportunities

Further emphasize the value of user research to the organization, digging into deeper problems users may have. This could have potentially led to an increase in early adopters if we had more clarity of the most pressing problems our customers have had.

Earlier testing of prototypes could have been conducted before even reaching hi-fi. Testing was only at the internal stakeholders level who people were not as closely involved were requested to provide feedback. However, it was acknowledged that due to time and resource constraints, this was the level of feedback available.

My involvement with the company ended before the formal launch of this upgraded version of the loyalty product but I would recommend adding analytics to monitor platform usage. This way, internally, the product team can be just as data-informed as we wanted our merchants to be.