Driving long-term behavioural value with Rewards

Rewards is a restaurant-specific loyalty programme on Deliveroo Plus, our premium subscription that offers members free delivery on orders over a minimum basket total.

Project overview

Plus has already shown the ability to drive long-term behavioural changes – users who sign up improve their average ordering frequency by 40%.

As we develop and expand Plus, we went forward with building a loyalty programme that rewards repeat orders at partnering restaurants using a simple “do X, get Y” mechanic.

The goal is to improve the Plus perception of value for money, which can be measured by improved subscriber retention and increase in order frequency.

My role

Owned the content design and strategy as the sole UX writer
Collaborated closely with product design, user research, product management, data science, product marketing and engineering as well as legal, brand and comms
Managed translations of the feature with our localisation coordinator
Flexed as needed to respond to COVID-19

But first, research

Gathering customer insights

To test and validate some ideas, we held two sessions of rapid iterative testing and evaluation (RITE) over the course of two weeks. Updating the designs of the prototypes between every few participants allowed us to get feedback on a variety concepts.

Synthesised notes for mission 1

Mission 1 looked at discoverability – mainly if customers understood what Rewards was, the mechanics and how to find reward restaurants.

Synthesised notes for mission 2

Mission 2 looked at whether users could understand how to place a reward order. Do they know if they’re hitting minimum order value? Can they find the rewards banner on menu?

Synthesised notes for mission 3

Mission 3 explored how rewards would interact with our platform offers with their own minimum order values. From a customer standpoint, is it confusing? Is it too visually overbearing?

Synthesised notes for mission 4

Mission 4 looked into reward redemption. Can customers figure out how to redeem their rewards? When their rewards expire? Are rewards and incomplete reward cards visually distinct enough?

End-of-day discussion

After each day of testing, the user researcher, product designer and I would sit down for an hour and go over our learnings. We’d point out what we know to be true, and what we need to dig more into. This helped us ideate better solutions.

Wider team collaboration

Between days of research, we ran a team-wide workshop with our cross-functional collaborators.

We asked our engineers, product managers, product marketers and data scientists to help us solve some of the gaps and problems identified in the first round of research to take to the second round.

Heads down, all focus 👀

A chattier method of ideating

Post-dot voting

This was an incredibly fun and effective way to show off our work, learn about technical constraints and ultimately cultivate our relationships outside of the immediate experience team.

The writing process

Establishing content goals

From research, we found that customers really appreciated moments of celebration and delight, but overall favoured a more subdued presence as they didn’t want Rewards to overwhelm their ordering experience.

Still, they wanted to be able to find participating restaurants and to follow their reward progress so good discoverability was of key interest.

With those takeaways in mind, the content goals I set were:

Be vocal about Rewards, but ensure that the experience fits and feels embedded into the existing Plus experience
Make the experience delightful and motivational
Keep it simple and reduce the need for more product education than necessary
Future-proof Rewards as much as possible to scale

How we talk in Rewards

Building off the established content goals, I created a voice framework to guide my writing style:

Motivational and encouraging, but not shouty or over-the-top
Clear and instructional, but not wordy or jargon-y
Familiar, but not boring or lackluster

Strategising comms

So a customer’s made a reward order – how do we bring them back in?

In collaboration with our product marketer, I strategised a comms lifecycle outside of the product to accompany the in-product experience.

Looking into the future

From the very beginning, we allowed ourselves to think big. If we started off dreaming about Rewards at its full potential, we can make sure we design it in a way that leaves room for growth and scaling.

We envisioned:

Adopting a points system – a Deliveroo-wide points system could live alongside it, allowing us to think beyond rewards like discounts, free dishes and credit
Partnerships – Giving customers chances to earn outside of our product ecosystem (e.g. groceries, subscription services like Netflix or Spotify, airline miles)
Tiered rewards – Opening up Rewards to all Deliveroo customers and split into tiers, with Plus customers earning quicker and better rewards
Rewards for APAC – Designing a more complex rewards programme for APAC markets as our competitors already offer customers loyalty programmes, many of them also tiered.

Thoughts and takeaways

Owning the content design for Plus Rewards was an incredible experience. It was a challenging project, especially with the pandemic throwing a spanner in the works right before our scheduled launch.

How I influenced the Rewards experience with content:

Collaborated closely with product design to inform designs every step of the way, from sketching to hi-fi UI components
Participated and helped plan research missions to ensure content was being considered
Communicated content strategy to VP-level stakeholders for buy-in

On the other side, there are things I probably would’ve done differently or would’ve done with more time:

Work with more informative data
Set up a more streamlined translations workflow

Outcome

Due to COVID-19, the launch of this experiment was delayed as our go-to-market strategy had to be changed before rollout.

As of May 2020, this experiment has been rolled out to 50% of Plus users in London.