PROJECT LEMON:
Strengthening loyalty for an athleisure brand
Curate a community-based loyalty experience for wellness-focused individuals to encourage synergistic interactions between brand and customer.
The Ask
"Research, design, and prototype a loyalty experience for your client using, and possibly improving, Antavo as your base technology platform. The final deliverable will be a 20 minute final presentation with questions from the audience."
Antavo provides a turnkey loyalty management solution to create online and omnichannel customer loyalty programs that help brands and retailers build brand love and change customer behavior.
Our client was founded in 1998 as a retailer of yoga pants and other yoga wear. The company has since expanded it’s product selection to sell its products online and internationally in 491 stores.
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planning
Scoping our work
Embarking on a one month project to research, design, prototype, and pitch a brand new app... For a team of three emerging designers, this was quite a big ask. And to answer to such a big ask, we needed a plan.
Since this is a dynamic calendar - functioning both as a schedule and also an action plan/Kanban board - what you see here is the last version that I grabbed a picture of after our project completion. As you see, the tasks we set out to do have mostly all been slotted into the "Completed" row.
When it comes to planning, what better way to plan than to start with a timeline?
This was our way of bracing ourselves, setting the right timelines, and safeproofing any off-course detours. Or in the case that a detour becomes necessary, we have a sense of comfort knowing that this calendar was not set in stone - we can pivot and adjust, while still having our milestones (and finish line) in sight.
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Discovery
Exploring the brand
To create a viable solution for our client, we must first understand what their brand is all about, who their target audiences are, and what unique propositions they offer. On the flipside, we must also be aware of public perception toward the brand to gain a more nonbiased view of the company beyond their own marketing. Only then will we be able to form a clear picture of what exactly is our client's business problem, and tackle this in the most effective way.
Lululemon's manifesto. We ended up gaining a lot of inspiration from this visual text, because we could better understand their tone of voice and attitude - which, in turn, indicates what type of audience they are aiming to attract.
Ready, Set... Research!
After receiving the project briefing, we noted the fact that our client was not the only stakeholder, and that we were also working in partnership with another company whose expertise was in digital loyalty products. As such, we planned our research accordingly to cover what we thought would be the three most important parts: (1) desk/secondary, (2) competitive analysis, (3) loyalty program research.
The reason why we dedicated an entire chunk of research to (3) was because none of our team members were industry specialists and thus required a lot of foundational knowledge in order to design for the optimal solution.
The following images will show the summarized notes that I took as part of part (1), as well as the key insights that I shared with my team later. Thanks to Miro, the collaborative platform we used, I was able to utilize its tools to help graphically organize, then communicate bulks of information in a more visual, legible manner.
As you can see, I tried to condense a large volume of information into their most actionable form by analyzing trends, highlighting key points, and drawing out what would be useful for us moving forward when we develop a strategy for the company. This insights tree is my attempt to organize my findings further to come to these gold nuggets. An example of something I was trying to think through was whether the business problem was to increase the AMOUNT of customers (breadth), or if it was to DEEPEN the loyalty of existing customers (depth), and how we might approach each of these problem differently.
We also conducted other research as a team, including competitive research and vendor-based research (specifically focused on loyalty programs offered by our partner). Each of our designers had our own way of gathering, collecting, and summarizing our research so Miro was a perfect tool for us because of its versatility in catering to our personal work styles.
Working as a group, it was important that not only could we divide and conquer, but also know how to come back together and share the necessary information so we can all collectively have enough knowledge coverage to make decisions and move forward.
All of my team's research at a glance. To highlight the three giant yellow sticky notes in the middle left; this tells us how our different sections of research can inform which later parts of the design process. For instance, market insights allow us to align with the client, competitor insights can give us inspiration to ideate upon, and information on loyalty will necessarily constrain us when solutioning.
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ANALYSIS
Uncovering findings
When setting a direction for the design and execution phase, a constant reminder we had for ourselves was to always question, why? How can we justify that we are not only designing things for the sake of it, or based on personal preferences, but instead, actually creating value? Through what means or metrics can we gauge our success in creating said value?
Whiteboarding: categorizing what contents we should be considering, and the logic behind our yet-to-come strategy
From our in-house UX guru, tips on how to write a good HMW
How do we "how might we"?
Despite being a single sentence, I would never underestimate the difficulty of writing a solid "how might we" (HMW). It's like writing a good thesis statement for an essay - it must convey your message and sum up pages of text with a meaningful selection of keywords. Needless to say, it was a difficult process for us as well, not only because of the wordsmithing, but the prerequisite of knowing what strategic direction we were proposing for our product.
We had many team work sessions to figure out how to articulate our ideas, and also consulted our seniors for advice (two images above).
Diverge: Exploring thematic ideas that we drew out from research. The word cloud was put together by pasting all of our research into a generator, and the most frequent words appear largest. It's a unique, yet simple way to identify keywords!
Converge: Picking out the most probable ideas by colour coding our first exercise's outcomes according to importance and viability, then further iterating upon our selected bunch of HMWs.
Because we had so many ideas and not a clear, focused direction, we used the double-diamond technique to first brain dump out all of our ideas in a "diverging" brainstorm, before shifting to a "converge" mindset to narrow down and further iterate upon our selection. By organizing our ideas more structurally, it gives us fresh perspective on how to frame our thoughts, sparking more inspiration in the process. The refined statement is shown below:
In retrospect, our HMW is a bit wordy. And over time, we will practice and learn to make our words even more concise to communicate the big idea in a short, sweet way! But for now, with this preliminary statement, we were able to address the business problem for our client, frame the benefits for users, and expressed our determination to hone in on the opportunity gap that it presented.
We also set another constraint for ourselves based on scale and region, as we knew that cultural differences can significantly impact user behaviours and thus, our eventual app design. Being a global brand, we knew that our client would have business problems and goals at different scales. From this macro view, we honed in on a regional target (the Asia-Pacific region) that we thought had a high potential for customer acquisition based on market trends (I will elaborate more on this target audience when discussing personas later). Then, at the most actionable level, comes the implementable solution based on loyalty that we will set out to design. All the while, the qualities of an optimal product shall be measured by a continuous and deeper brand engagement, from which the company, our partner, and of course, the end users (customers) will benefit.
I was in charge of creating Persona A, "The Career Woman". I wanted to start off with a simpler, less restrictive brainstorm of just what this user would hear, see, feel, think, say/do. This was also a great exercise for me to exercise my empathy skills for this imaginary person.
Personas
We wanted to create personas to better understand our target audience's behaviours, needs, pains, and goals. Having this information clearly defined would allow us think from the perspective of our customer, and separate our personal preferences from the design (the common mistake of designer = user!). Also, the more full-fledged and realistic the persona, the more reliable our representation of the target segment. This way, we can ensure that the users will be at the forefront of design decisions.
We realized when synthesizing our research that there would to be at least two personas, because there were two main target groups that were far too different to be encapsulated within one. We wanted to capture these varying traits as the highest potential focus groups, and suggest this to our client as part of the strategy we would propose.
I was responsible for "The Career Woman," an existing customer of our client, whom often rocks athleisure, and has more serious motivations about staying well and feeling fit. She is also someone who is career-oriented and facing cultural, familial pressures. These character traits were a culmination of the research that was previously conducted. The second persona, "The Family Guy," was created by my teammate, and represents the second largest target customer - not yet an avid fan of our brand, and has little to none experience in fitness, but starting to see the need to exercise more so he can continue to play with his children even as he ages.
By having these clear and structured persona documents, we could always refer back to them and be able to always have alignment on what our user is like, and how it should inform our designs.
Below are the visualized, simplified versions of the personas that were later displayed in our final deck. We really wanted to use flatlay photography as a way to showcase a “what’s in my bag” visualization of what the user possesses and uses most frequently, as a way to tell the story about who they are, hence the layout you see below.
Despite being at varying degrees of expertise and commitment when it comes to staying fit in their current daily lives, we knew there was lots of potential for loyalty integrations in our product that could appeal to these audience types in different ways.
Always validate
Since our client operates mainly from physical retail stores (but of course, increasing digital uptake due to the global pandemic), we thought it would be worth paying a visit to a local store near us. As the team member located in the city with the least restrictive measures at the time, Hong Kong, I took on this task and visited a couple stores to get a deeper understanding of how existing customers use the space, what kinds of digital integrations are already offered, whether there might be regional-specific design choices.
With a notebook in hand, I used the AEIOU technique to jot down all my observations, not being precious as to maximize the selection of valuable nuggets later on. Here is a sample of what I noted:
Some personal notes on research collection techniques that I revisited in preparation for the onsite store visit
Entrance of the store, with the company's motto and regional illustration front and center
Fitting room design and how customers are using the space. Despite the small amount of people it still looks a bit crowded. Rounded corner design as inspiration.
Using biophilic (natural) decoration and smart mirrors that have QR code stickers - an opportunity for app integration?
What kinds of imagery are the company projecting? Are these globally used images or regional-specific (supposedly the former since the model is not ethnically Asian)
We also knew we wanted to validate some of the assumptions we previously made in the early research phase.
What about the employees?
What we lacked understanding on the most was the voice of our client's employees. Through our research, we found that the relationship between the customer (called "Guests") and store associates (called "Educators") was crucial for building a positive brand image. Therefore, we predicted that these interactions would necessarily form part of our product's customer journey. But our knowledge in this area was limited only to user forums (i.e. Reddit) and public website reviews (i.e. Google maps). So I took this chance while being onsite to also conduct some guerrilla interviews with both Educators and Guests (and simultaneously learned that in an official, larger scaled project capacity, it would probably be best to go through a full administrative approval process beforehand... but with our limited time, we did not really want to go through all this bureaucracy for a few short conversations).
With our new findings, we could also strengthen our findings through primary research, and collect real quotes from people.
With these new findings in tow, these were shared with my teammates and we had further discussions to dissect and pick out the most important insights that we could act upon and move forward onto creating our user journeys. Two were created, one for each audience type, as future state journey maps where we could map out areas of pain, opportunity, and pleasure, to focus on when designing the product experience.
User journey for "The Career Woman," Jolie. Click to enlarge.
User journey for "The Family Guy," Eric. Click to enlarge.
Lastly, here are the main insights that we captured and mapped opportunities for. This summary also appeared in the appendix for our final presentation:
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ideate
Brain storms and rainbows
How might we curate a community-based loyalty experience for wellness-minded individuals seeking a balanced lifestyle, so that it ensures continuous engagement and synergy between Lululemon and their guests?
Some different templates and ways of ideating that we considered. In the end, we chose Disney's strategy and modified it slightly by changing the "Realist" stage to simply a dot voting and further narrowing down before applying the "Critic" analysis.
We ideated in 4 phases:
(1) free individual brainstorm, timed;
(2) dot voting
(3) thematic grouping/categorization;
(4) prioritizing based on risks, constraints, and overall suitability
While the ideation process was super enjoyable - getting to unleash our creativity, imagine limitless possibilities etc., - it was also exhausting to sift, sort, and filter masses of ideas, then put on our critical thinking caps to prioritize and pick out only the best few to move forward with.
Phase (1)
Phase (2) and (3)
Phase (3) and (4)
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EXECUTE
Divide, Conquer, and Deliver
With a clear direction and features locked down, it was time to finally get hands-on designing! We knew that building screens was a priority, so that our product can be best envisioned by our audience, and have our concepts come to life in tangible form. We also crafted a 20-minute pitch, including an explanation of background context, our proposed strategy, and all of the rationale/process behind it.
We divied up roles and had myself work on the entire deck while my two other teammates focused on screen building. We made ourselves readily available for any impromptu sync-up calls or even longer work sessions where needed, to ensure we were always aligned. While my teammates could work collaboratively on Figma and see each other's progress right away, I was a bit removed since I chose to work in Keynote (as it had more animation features which would really help our deck shine, I figured), a not-so-team-friendly tool. Instead, I made sure to connect regularly with my team, especially when it came to the crucial parts of the deck such as the overall structure/skeleton, overall art direction, and some of the key diagrams that would explain our strategy (i.e. "Business Problem," slide 2). I also saved a new version of the presentation daily and uploaded this to our shared drive not only to have backups, but to allow any team members to download and view at their convenience.
This workflow worked really well for us, and I truly felt that after many weeks of working together, that we had already achieved a level of teamwork with efficient communication, compromise, a level of comfort to speak honestly and ask for help when needed, and a good understanding of each others' skillsets. With this, we trusted each other to deliver the last pieces of our project with utmost quality and care.
In the presentation deck above, you will also see sample screen videos of the prototype that we captured beforehand and added a live voiceover while presenting, as to show a step-by-step explanation of what one would see on screen.
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REFLECTION
"We did it!"
After delivering our final presentation, we were exhiliarated and filled with adrenaline. We had not only met the initial expectations, but received feedback that we far exceeded them. But most importantly, it was such an unforgettable experience as young designers to create a whole product and undergo a full design process based on a brief, from scratch. I could not be more proud of our team and what we achieved through perseverence, heart, effort, and the support we always had for each other.
Final team reflection. Now, onwards to the next one! I wonder what awaits...
