Aiming to design accessible and concise RBC rewards and easy to use for RBC members
Team
Individual
My responsibility (Role)
UX Research
UX/UI Design
Timeline
May 2023 to Jun 2023
Background
RBC Avion rewards service allows users to keep track of points they have as well as transfer, redeem, and pay bills with points, including introducing a variety of offers that users encounter through websites. In addition, it could bring considerable engagement from users.
What is the project about?
As an active user of RBC, I’ve tried to gain and save rewards points by doing many activities. However, I found the RBC rewards website sort of inconvenient in some ways such as redeeming points, transferring points between accounts, and paying bills using points. So it came to my mind Why doesn’t RBC rewards provide well-organized information and simplify user flow
What problems I wanted to solve ?
The RBC rewards’ complex user flow of transferring, redeeming, offering, and paying through using points presents a challenge for users to accomplish specific tasks while using it. Also, non-intuitive functionalities and inconsistent layouts cause frustrations to users.
What was my solutions ?
I set up some features based on research and user’s feedback. Here is some solutions for features I added:
→ Combined and organize information together in one place to keep track of personal points, transactions and etc
→ Created a simplified user flow about using rewards points
→ Improve a shopping page by adding filters and putting more emphasis on visual hierarchy
→ Combined and organize information together in one place to keep track of personal points, transactions and etc
→ Created a simplified user flow about using rewards points
→ Improve a shopping page by adding filters and putting more emphasis on visual hierarchy
Design process
01 Customer Review Analysis
At first, I conducted a competitive and feature analysis of the rewards service in the market. Then I interviewed end-users to gain further insights into their motivation and pain points. Here is some research plans I followed :
1–1 Online Review
In order to gain some user feedback on the current website and app, I’ve checked out Google, App Store, and Reddit. The most common and frequent complaint is that users don’t understand and use certain features, which should be improved. By analyzing online reviews, I found three major pain points :
1. Struggles with reaccessing.
Users were frustrated with accessing back and forth. For the shop page, as there’s no save feature for items, users have to go to the shop page and jump to the other page to see what things they have On their cart. Some users even tend to give up checking out items they like. Also, users don’t like going back to another page when using rewards points and logging in.
2. Limited filter features.
Users had difficulties discovering products and items that matched their preferences and rewards points since the Avion rewards website had very limited category filters. Users wish to have more options to filter through before going merchandise page. By doing so, users don’t have to set the filters up again.
3. No search function.
Home screen
Users commonly mentioned that it’s a bummer that they have no search function on the Avion rewards website. Users have no idea of where to ask questions, taking more time to find what users need.
1–2 User Interviews
In order to discover what needs users are looking for, I’ve conducted 3 user interviews based on user research. This step of the process helped me to put on the user’s shoes more than mine.
Pain Point 1 - Lack of understanding of the specific feature
3/4 of users answered that they don’t know what the “Featured offers“ feature is, the purpose behind it, and how it is generated. it brings users to the same page as the offer load page by clicking the offer button, making users confused.
Pain Point 2 - No way to know the list of expiring offer dates
4/4 of users have experienced missing the offers that RBC provides to users since there is no information or notification of what offer they loaded and when they expired. Also, the visual hierarchy of information is not well grouped together to showcase to users
Pain Point 3 - Absence of a direct transfer or payment function with points
2/4 of users complained that jumping to the RBC backing to e-transfer or pay over rewards points is sort of inconvenient. Users wish that there was a quick transfer for points in Avion.
Design Opportunities
02 Competitive Analysis
I decided to analyze two rewards services of competitive platforms to collect references in similar existing features and understand their strategies. This helped me find appropriate solutions and the upsides and downsides of the RBC rewards
✓Competitors
Since I need access to explore and analyze competitive platforms, I chose these three that I use daily. By glancing at them, I discovered that they have pretty similar strategies and features for rewards services, including earning and spending points in various ways. However, three platforms, RBC – Avion, TD rewards, and Scotiabank – SCENE, use quite complicated flows when using points.
RBC
TD bank
Scotiabank
✓Feature
Next, I made a list of some key features of those websites and compared their strengths and weaknesses. By doing this, I had a deep understanding of how they work and I found that key insights and solutions that could help RBC-Avion rewards improve.
03 Persona
Using those insights and specifics from the interviews and research, I created a persona to guide my design process with empathy and the users’ needs at the forefront.
Persona 1 - Peter
Ideate
01 User Flow
I’ve started by creating user flows based on user research. Users commonly mentioned and complained that they want to have and keep track of personal information. By collecting all the resources, I came up with ideas that could help users use them easily when entering the website. However, I created new user flows with my feasible ideas for several pages. These are my proposed user flows.
02 Wireframes
I mapped out wireframes in detail and created each step of the wireframes. As I started to lay out all of the wireframes in Figma, eventually, I found out that there were some weaknesses in my potential ideas. I kept the scope narrow by going back and forth between them led me to come up with new solutions.
03 Usability Test
I conducted four users for usability tests with prototyping. The purpose of this activity was to validate my solutions of design. By doing so, I could observe how users interact with the product, make adjustments based on the user’s voice and see how much I met the user’s needs.
# 4 users were asked to do the following tasks on the desktop
During the usability test, users mostly could complete the tasks. However, there was a lot of confusion, especially in the task of finding the expired date of (Task1) or applying filters to shopping(Task 5). users mentioned some features that could be improved. Based on this observation and interviews, I made some adjustments for each task.
✓Adjustments
•Task 3 - Find the expiration date of loaded offers
Before adjustment, users could notice the expiration date of loaded offers by the color, but they asked me how to discover or search specific brands
Before
After
After adjustment, I put a search bar that helps users discover loaded offers quickly. Also, I added the Recently searched feature and popular filter within a search bar. By doing so, it allows users to nudge searching and narrow options down, not spending much time on thinking about the ideas for search.
•Task 5 - Apply filters to shopping
Before adjustment, most of the users finished the task that I asked for such as applying filters but two of the users mentioned that applying filters may be confusing since there’s only a search button within a search bar. They were unsure which button they should click and asked me if the search button meant applying filters.
Before
After
After adjustment, I designed the applied filter section to check and look at what filters and searches users apply. By doing this, the confusion between the search button and filters could be improved.
Final Design
Login page
“ How might we help users to keep track of their offers and transactions efficiently?"
“How might we encourage users to redeem and transfer rewards points directly?”
“How might we help users navigate the shopping page through filters before gaining the outcomes?”
Reflection
01 What I learned
Doing appropriate User research
• I had a hard time finding the right users for conducting user interviews. Before started to do this, I had a lack of confidence about my potential ideas and I wasn’t sure that it would help users to use the rewards system with them. However, I’ve looked through an online review of the RBC Avion website as a starting point. After completing user interviews and implementing them into my potential ideas, I came up with feasible solutions and I could move forward with the next phase of the UX process and came up with feasible solutions.
Keep Consistency
• It was a bit difficult to apply the same colors and principles that RBC uses. By following this, I researched fonts, color schemes, layouts, and logos. Eventually, I ended up having ideas of what it would look like after doing this, but still hard to build on the same design pattern. Kept thinking about the design of RBC and Avion rewards led me to utilize the design pattern and finish it.
