FLYBUYS

What is Flybuys?

flybuys is Australia’s largest and most recognised customer and partner loyalty/rewards program with over 12 million cardholders across 6 million households. 

Members can collect points and redeem on everyday purchases.

What makes it unique?

Unlike other loyalty programs, flybuys boasts 12m active members and leading brand partners that enable it to provide rich data insights into consumer purchasing behaviour.

Objectives

Redesign the current state flybuys: Registration, account activation, sign-in (low/high state), account recovery, MFA/2FA, security centre, and migration flow with accompanying modifications in the user, partner, and account dashboards.

Roles and Responsibilities

UX/CXs Lead

• Stakeholder management

• Customer/user research

• Journey mapping

• Workshops and presentations

• Voice of Customer/Employee

• KPI/metrics

• Current state prototypes

• Usability testing

• High fidelity UI

• Functional specs

• Design system

Duration

Discovery: 8 weeks - onboarding to executive presentation (validated prototype)
Acceleration: 16 weeks - validation, iteration, refresh, and production

Outcome

Production-ready desktop website validated with customers, business (marketing, operations, analytics, partner team, technology), security, and technology - sign-off from all concerned departments.

Key Takeaways

• This ushering in of a new, scalable era for flybuys was exciting and senior stakeholders dusted off extensive change wish-lists. Many departments had conflicting needs, requiring a delicate workshop approach and metric-level reporting to depoliticise the conversations.

• Only minor design updates to the site had been made in the past 3 years so on-page conversion rates were largely the same across all journeys.

• eDM and in-store campaign efforts were cause for seasonable spikes in traffic and conversion.

• This data provided a clear picture of funnel drop-offs and poor conversion, due to form, navigation design, and lack of device and browser compatibility.

• Beyond improving existing flows, I was designing several new flows (MFA/2FA, account security centre, and migration flow) the processes become clear that delivery would involve a combination of collaboratively creating basic UX artefacts (personas to build a common-language) to be given the green-light to assemble validated user cases/requirements and then to blend with both the business, technology, and security requirements.
  

Current-state desktop conversion rates (CVR) seen below

Contextual Interviews

To bring an attitudinal context to the data, I interviewed 8 flybuys members. Then, undertaking contextual enquiry reviewing how members use the card or app in-store, engaging them at check-out, and discuss their experience.

Co-Design

Workshops with the Marketing, Analytics, Partner, and Operations department heads were held to unpack key requirements; time-boxed discussions, ideation, and voting.

The goal was to sweep up all the issues and co-design key design artefacts that had been flagged as requirements by the sponsor.

Armed with contextual research results and analytics data we discussed the requirements list, tipped those into pulling out segmentation data (Experian Mosaics Classifications) to co-designing personas (below), members, and partner journeys for each segment, reframing, and prioritised use cases.

Key Takeaways

• Managing expectations: Internal change requests had been banking up for some time. The primary concern was that what senior stakeholders believed to be critical needs, had to be reframed towards the user experience and redirected back to both the qual/quant data.

• Post all-hands workshops it was evident that everyone was clear and excited about the update. But not without concerns, Insights team wanted to capture considerable data at registration while Marketing was pushing for a stronger onboard experience.

• I needed to prototype and validate with users, bring real data back to the conversation to cut through the noise.

Stakeholder Interviews

Flybuys employees across Data, Marketing and Operations and Technology were looped into the program of work conversation, I arranged 1:1 time as directed by the department heads, speaking with team members and getting a greater understanding of the processes underpinning the product and services across the journeys.

Service Blueprint

Armed with the journey, business, and system data and with a wealth of insights across the user journey and technology touch-points, it was apparent that service blueprint was needed for current state to allow all teams to zoom in and out on each touchpoint. I drafted, workshopped and delivered the final poster to all departments.

Key Takeaways

• Validated touch-points was a strong rally point for all the teams, primer for the portfolio roadmapping work we did next in Jira.

• Technology and tool choices were taking considerably involved, highly politicised conversations, which surfaced/become more transparent once the mapping had taken place.

• The conversation moved to future state very quickly from this point.

Design Refresh

With multiple new flows and no budget for A/B testing or CRO, I undertook usability testing across two separate rounds (4 participants per variation) to validate concepts again using both exploratory and specific tasks.

Key takeaways:

• As Coles/flybuys was accustomed to running product focus groups as part of testing, it was decided that we would include them. Usability testing had to be conducted to compliment the HL insights from focus groups.

• I was only granted limited budget to undertake testing, I ended up taking a guerrilla approach, at the store level, to meet quota.

Stakeholder alignment

• The mandate by Wesfarmers to move off the Coles stack represented a significant change for the business with a great deal of competing priorities and high expectations. The stakeholder and expectations management component was significantly more than expected but not insurmountable.

• Flybuys had been reliant on Coles design department for all of this UX/UI outputs. While the relationship was excellent, it had resulted a low cadence in terms of output with the flybuys website getting sporadic updates as a result of numerous cross-department requests. This resulted in inconsistency across the design/experience and segregated ownership around primary journey pages and touch points. This fed into the stakeholder management effort.

• To bolster the Flybuys design function, an early move was to resource the flybuys Marketing Department with additional resources, however, this team was mainly responsible for eDM oversight (always on and seasonal campaigns) and mostly concerned with visual design. They borrowed heavily from the new product research approach (segmentation, analytics and focus groups) and were new to adopting UX research and design activities in order to answer many of the upcoming migration design challenges. This required a straddling of both old and new methodologies to bring familiarity to a new process.

C-suite support

• Considerable trust and autonomy given to the team to get unfetter access to all assets offset the challenges elsewhere and I was able to move quickly with little to no constraint.

• Despite initial guidance not to undertake stakeholder interviews, 1:1 interviews with all key stakeholders prior to our workshops proved invaluable in building rapport and streamlining approves at the concept stage.

• The flybuys Product Managers assigned to each squad saw considerable uptick in collaborative effort and momentum in the project. Technical know-how was varied with the PMs resulting in merging of teams as requirements evolved.

Integrative process

• Each department had competing feature and tooling wish-lists which required scoping/estimation from new established teams and comparative assessment and prioritisation from flybuys. Early, there was no clear authority on these decisions, post-discovery it took two-months for a Product Management-to-Squad structure to be introduced which solved the issue. This was a lost opportunity to build momentum early.

• With sweeping changes to the website, research was not nearly as robust as required. Too few participants around attitudinal data, and little previous research data yielded statistically insignificant insights and test results.

• Use case gaps were filled with stakeholder wish-list features that caused friction within the broader team. Unfortunately, better research; user interviews, survey, A/B testing etc could have cut-through the noise and remedied much of the discussions taking place. Valuable time was lost.

• Multiple vendors working on the production state introduced unnecessarily complexity to prioritising resulting in avoidable delays and rework at each hand-over point.

Building practice

• We moved into the Acceleration Phase of the project, hired another ~40 people and undertook a design refresh that flybuys used their new design team to lead.

• I moved from customer-facing experience to partner-facing experience and built out the BI dashboards against internal use cases.

• Post-delivery of analytics dashboards for Kmart and Target, I moved back into Versent as the Digital Practice Director - evangelising UX design and standing up the Digital practice. This role included establish the operational processes, developing the digital playbook (Confluence), creating presentation decks, working with the Sales team to bring in new clients, developing case studies, presenting findings Versent wide, developing the hiring manual, building out contractors/employee relations, working with our collaborative delivery partners etc.

• From late 2019, flybuys launched each new web flow periodically, the customer-facing components of my work went live.