Starbucks Rewards
Introducing AI and intelligent location services to evolve Starbucks Rewards’ UX.
Not affiliated with Starbucks.
The idea
Case Study: Increase Starbucks' app revenue by identifying, prioritizing, and introducing feature changes on Starbucks Rewards.
Project Date
2021
Role
Designer
The overview
This project was originally part of a consultative sales program, where teams of 3 were assigned a company and hypothetical business problem to solve using our company's technology. My team was tasked to increase Starbucks' revenue and pitch our solution to program advisors assuming the roles of Starbucks' COO and SVP of Digital Customer Experience.
Note: The scope of the original project was focused on pitching the solution and business outcome. For the purposes of this case study, I assumed a designer role and created a high fidelity prototype based on our solution pitch.
Problem Statement: Starbucks is facing challenges due to the pandemic - stores are closing, there's no seating available, and there's an overall non-existent Starbucks "experience" outside of the stores. How do we help them increase their revenue?
Project Goals:
Identify and prioritize approaches to tackle the revenue challenge
Utilize design thinking and agile methodologies to find the target audience and brainstorm how our company's technology could augment mobile feature capabilities
Build a business case and create visual mockups of the feature changes to demonstrate to key stakeholders
Scope and Constraints: Timeline was our biggest constraint - we had less than a week to deliver this project from end-to-end.
In this case study, I wanted to balance both function and form to redesign a high fidelity prototype of Starbucks Rewards’ UI to showcase the 2 new features that we had pitched.
The process
Tackling the revenue challenge
My team started out by discussing the business problem and brainstorming potential solution angles. At this point in time, we solely focused on how to approach the problem. "How do we combat the revenue challenges that Starbucks was facing due to the pandemic?" We could either 1) decrease costs or 2) increase revenue. My team decided to go the revenue route because we saw an opportunity for our company's technology to augment their existing mobile app experience. After some more brainstorming, we chose two areas to focus on 1) increasing Starbucks' customer base and 2) cross selling products.
Finding the right target audience
Next, we had to choose the right target audience. Our broad user base was existing and prospective Starbucks rewards members. Since Starbucks is a retail company that sells a "lifestyle" through their coffee products, my team decided to focus on mobile users to promote the "easy, on-the-go" aspect of the Starbucks experience, better integrating coffee runs into daily life. That's how we created our user persona Hannah:
With Hannah in mind, we conducted design thinking exercises such as an empathy map, as-is scenario, needs statement, ideation, and prioritization grid. These methods ensured that we kept a user-focused mindset as we began brainstorming potential solutions. The entire brainstorming process can be found below:
Building the business case
As a result of our analysis, we decided to prioritize two new features and their benefits:
Personalized promotional offers —> cross-sell, up-sell products
Location services —> increase wait time visibility
Finally, we presented the final deliverable to our stakeholders - this included a pitch deck and walkthrough demos that showcased the new features that we added. It was important to us to maintain a two-fold focus on app features + app benefits.
The design
Prototype Features
#1: Personalized promotional offers to help cross-sell + up-sell more products
#2: Implementing location services to increase user wait time visibility
The outcome
In the end, our group ranked first out of six groups. Feedback we received was positive and highlighted how we were able to successfully introduce the new app features and translate those to business benefits for Starbucks through our compelling storytelling and demos.
Key takeaways and lessons learned
1. Learning to prioritize and balance both user benefits and business outcomes
2. Iterations, iterations, iterations - nothing comes out perfectly the first time
3. Law of Past Experience - keeping UI elements that users are familiar with will help them easily navigate the new features