KFC App Growth - UX/UI -Reward Sharing, Long-Term Habit Forming
Overview
KFC wanted to apply game mechanics to their app and also revamp their reward section to go with their new loyalty game. It was my job as Senior Product Designer to one the project strategy and to create long-term habit-forming social features to boost user engagement and loyalty.
Challenges
Running technical capability discovery alongside the design process
Creating a new screen to have reuse value across different use cases
KFC was working on multiple live projects that would directly impact my reward-sharing project
Outcomes
Increase loyal customer engagement
Increase new KFC sign ups
Increase in rewards click through
Duration
4 months / a quarter
Remote Ideation Workshop
I conducted an ideation workshop with the wider digital team to generate ideas to explore that would help us achieve our outcomes and create habits that would expose our customers to more of our menu. The Product Owner, Product Manager, Developers, Designers and Commercial Revenue team attended the workshop. We went through rounds of generating presenting and then refining ideas. It was essential to get their input from the beginning as it would be easier to get their buy-in later on in the process.
From the ideation workshops, three ideas were selected to be researched.
Reward sharing
Increasing the visibility of the KFC app on other KFC platforms
Promoting a free gift on sign-up more prominently throughout the app
Miro remote ideation workshops
Competitor Analysis
I explored the three selected ideas by conducting a competitor analysis and reviewing the KFC app for which screens would be affected.
I presented my research findings at the next project team workshop. I recommended the reward-sharing idea as Costa Coffee offered it, but none of the other competitors for example Mcdonald's offered reward-sharing to its users.
Costa coffee competitor analysis
I let the team know the design effort and time frame it would take to deliver user flows and user-tested designs. Reward-sharing was selected as the idea we would work on and the development team started investigating the system capability to build this as I designed it.
Acceptance criteria meeting
I arranged a meeting with the Product owners to discuss the project's scope and acceptance criteria. Five acceptance criteria were agreed upon.
Rewards would be a completely personalised experience
Rewards can only be shared once
Rewards would have to work with the new KFC arcade loyalty scheme game
Users are reminded when rewards near the expiry date
Users without an app would have to sign up to claim a reward
User flow
I created user flows of how the new reward-sharing feature would work in the KFC app. As KFC had just launched a new reward arcade game offering for its users, I had to consider this in my user flows. I created four user flows in total.
Sharing a reward won from the KFC arcade.
Sharing a reward from the rewards section of the app.
Receiving a reward as a user with the KFC app.
Receiving a reward as a user without the KFC app.
Sharing a reward user flow.
After I had completed the user flows, I presented them to the wider product team consisting of the Product Owner and Development team for a peer review. This had some challenges as the development team had not finished exploring the capabilities of the platform. I sent the flows to the development team with notes about areas that still needed to be investigated. This helped the development team focus their investigation into platform capabilities.
Wireframes
With most of the user flows agreed upon, I could start wireframing the pages that would have to be updated to enable reward sharing. I had regular check-ins with the Development team to make sure what I was designing could be built. As a result of the build capabilities being discovered as I designed, I scheduled more check-in meetings with the Development team than was originally planned and iterated on the designs when needed. I also started working on the screen flows.
Sharing rewards screen flows
UI
After updating the user flows and wireframes to match the platform build capability, I started the UI design for the screens that needed updating. I focused on the personalisation aspect to indicate the state of a specific user’s rewards and their rewards history. I used the KFC design systems to ensure the designs matched the aesthetic feel of the app and website. I created components and added them to the KFC design system. Some of the new elements I made were the personalisation rewards tags and explainer banner.
New personalisation reward tags element I created
New explainer banner element I created
UI of main reward sharing screen with new reward sharing components
New screen
I had previously worked on the new KFC Arcade game designs and a finding from that project was customers did not understand how to interact with the new feature. After its launch KFC Care Squad received lots of enquiries from users about how to use the new rewards. As a result of this, I designed how-to screens for the rewards-sharing project with the capability to be reused in other parts of the app.
User test
As I was designing a new screen to solve a known problem that would be crucial to the experience of the new feature, I made time to do a guerilla usability test. I tested the designs of the main flow including the new how-to page and questions about the experience and user understanding.
One of the findings was users automatically knew to swipe through the how-to screen carousel. As a result of this, I removed the copy explaining the swipe function of the page. This allowed for more white space in the design which gave it a better feel.
Prototype of new KFC how-to screens
Delivery
I updated the KFC design system in Figma with the new elements I had created and then presented the designs at a sign-off meeting with The Product Owner, Product Manager, Developers, Designers and Commercial Revenue team. After getting signed off I prepared handover files in Figma and attended the developer’s weekly check-in meetings to answer any queries about the design implementation.
Outcome
After launch, the metrics for the outcomes were recorded on a monthly basis.
Month 1
Loyal customer engagement: ⬆️12%
New KFC sign-ups: ⬆️6%
Rewards click through: ⬆️7.5%
Month 2
Loyal customer engagement: ⬆️10.5%
New KFC sign-ups: ⬆️4.25%
Rewards click through: ⬆️5%