Acclaimed books right to your phones
The design process for creating Genius: a Bookify reward program
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The design process for creating Genius: a Bookify reward program
The Challenge
Bookify is an app that brings critically acclaimed books right to your phone. It allows you to quickly and easily digest new knowledge, expanding your perspectives and feeding your mind.
I led the Product Design - User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) - of this project. I also receive constructive feedback from others two fellow designers in order to improve and get other perspectives about what I was designing. My tasks were:
1. Customers Insights & Ideation
2. Building the Project Vision
3. Planning and scope definition
4. User Interface & Experience
5. Motion & Interactions
The first step of the design process involved user interviews and desk research to understand how competitors and users behave. I believe it’s important to get this information early on in the process, before having an idea or prototyping.
After analysing this insights, I began to conceptualize the solution, focusing on user flows and wireframe to give me a way to iterate faster through ideas. From this, From this, I went to the production mode, designing the interface considering design principles such as contrast, hierarchy and feedback; brand attributes; user interactions, and the imagistic universe presented as briefing by the case.
Once the interface was ready, I took feedback from two other fellow designers in order to understand the experience gaps. Validation, although part of my usual design process, would be a post-conceptualization and interface step and won’t be discussed in depth in this case.
Research
The interview sample took into account men and women aged from 27 to 36, inserted in the economically active population of the city of São Paulo, Brazil, and with different reading habits.The interview took approximately 30 minutes and included topics to get to the core of what users are trying to do and what their problems are. So I asked:
• What are your reading habits.
• Where do you get your content from.
• What products do you use for reading.
• What kinds of incentives would make you read more.
After analysing the interviews, despite the amount of generated data, this was the most relevant information for decision-making in creating the solution:
What we see is that although 90% of users understand that increased content consumption would help them become an expert in their profession, 70% of them say they find it very difficult to create healthy reading habits.
In addition, I researched data and habits related to other current Loyalty Programs. The goal was to understand how competitors behave and benchmark innovative reward programs.
The article 10 Examples of Innovative Customer Loyalty Programs, published by Lindsey Peacock brings relevant examples to the discussion such as Sephora, Amazon Prime, Starbucks and Apple. Addressing different techniques for redeeming points and rewards.
The main insights found is that Loyalty programs have been proven as one of the most effective tactics for increasing revenue and inspiring customer loyalty. As many as 84% of consumers say they’re more apt to stick with a brand that offers a loyalty program.
And 66% of customers say the ability to earn rewards actually changes their spending behavior.“As consumers, we can be pretty cynical about brands and marketing initiatives. We know the end goal is always to convince us to buy more products and spend more money.
That’s why the most innovative loyalty program takes the focus away from getting customers to spend more, and re-centers itself on creating value for them.
”By integrating users’ pain points and market insights, I understand that it’s possible to create a reward program that isn’t based solely on earning points by purchasing, but which adds value to a user’s daily life.Thus, the value proposition hypothesis is based on helping users to create a healthy reading routine — since 70% of them claim to struggle with that — and reward them every time they return to work towards that goal through the bookify app.
The Solution
A rewards program that not only gives you points by shopping, but also rewards you for developing reading habits, encouraging you to become a genius in your area of interest.
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Genius is bookify’s reward program. Its value proposition is to offer daily and weekly triggers to get the user to develop a reading habit and return daily to the App.
Users are rewarded with 1 point for completing a daily reading task of 10 minutes, limited to a maximum of 1 point per day. In addition, when users complete 7 consecutive days of readings, they are also awarded with 5 points.
A standard bonus system was also added to this model, in which points are earned for each purchase since the learning curve is smaller and this system could be a gateway for those users who bought a book and still don’t have a strong reading habit. Therefore, every $ 1 used in book purchases returns as 1 point for the user to redeem.
For every 25 earned points, users get a 5% discount on their next purchase. By earning 45 points, they get 10%. By reaching 55 points, they get 15%.
I took into account that the first points should be easier to reach and, with a daily reading habit of just 10 minutes, a user can earn enough points to get at least 5% discounts for the first month.
The main point of the flow is to ensure that the functionality is always visible to the user, but not in an obstructive way. So I decided to add it to the app’s bottom navigation. It’s only a tap away, but still not intrusive.
By tapping on the genius icon, users are taken to the onboard flow, interest collection and dashboard where they can check point balance and rewards.
The Wireframe was designed to build the structure and architecture of the information and only then go to visual and interactions.
Since this Reward program differs from competitors available in the market, it’s important that users understand the value proposition quickly: not just a point accumulator by purchasing, but a tool that accumulates points according to a user’s commitment to reading.
That’s why it’s important to create a space in the flow to explain the benefits of the Genius Reward Program. I chose to do this through an automatic slider.
Almost effortless for users see all content. The primary “get started” button is always visible on the screen, so the onboard assigns an overview of the functionality, but it doesn’t prevent them from continuing through the flow.
Also, the onboard would appear only the first time a user went through the flow. From the moment the user opts-in, this functionality turns into a “how it works” item on the dashboard.
Collecting topics that are most interesting to the user can help improve the referral system in a way that exchange of points is done by books relevant to the user’s daily life.
The choice of health, music, travel, arts, technology, food and design as topics has been based on desk research. So, they’re similar to what’s used by other booksellers in the market.
This screen is responsible for giving users a place to track their points. It has been thought to resemble a dashboard and bring the sense of status tracking.
The dashboard is split into “point status”, “rewards” and “How it works”, the latter being a space for the user to learn about how the program works.
On the time chart for daily reading, users can also see the 10 minute daily goal they wanna reach. This way they can plan and understand if they are closer or farther from their goal.
There’s also a set of notifications to let users know if the daily reading goal is reached (see banner in image 1). Besides that, once a user has enough points to redeem discounts, a banner on the book’s purchase page will show up.
Soft transitions are part of the interface to make interactions even more dynamic. Below is an example of the Login screen and the transition to opening home screen.
Branding
The brand’s guidelines led us to pick a playful and inviting tone, so we chose purple and green to break the white and make the brand youthful and remarkable.Yellow was added as well to give the interface a warmer look and contrast with illustrations.
For text, a much darker variation of purple has been brought in to ensure reading and contrast, thus reaching appropriate levels of accessibility.
Since 50% of users said they prefer reading paper books for feeling and nostalgia, we understand that this could be used as an opportunity in the app interface. Therefore, we use the combination of Tiempos serif typography with a sans-serif Circular.
To illustrate the onboard, I adapted the illustrations of Pablo Stanley, available at Ouch! marketplace. The illustrations’ colors were adapted to the brand’s universe, using variations of purple, green and yellow as main colors.
The Genius Reward Program should not become just a one-time delivery. It should be iterated by considering usability tests, A/B tests, and other in-depth surveys with the user to improve the initial version.
That said, launching this functionality is only the first step towards the program’s success.
In this way, analyzing metrics such as reading time, daily reading frequency, total points earned over time, and interests collected on the onboard would be important for understanding success and elaborating the product roadmap.
A big thanks to the people who participated in the interviews and gave me feedback to improve the idea.In particular, I thank Marcela Coutinho, Juliana Arthuso, Paula Ramão, Mariano Dantas, Matheus Giaccomini, Manuela Doerr, Camila Teixeira, Felipe Besson.That’s all.
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