Tim Armato — UX and Product Design

Extend the platform's redemption and checkout capabilities.  Providing a way to order Envu-specific rewards was one of our top priorities.

Eliminate pain points. Delivering a streamlined, user-friendly solution was essential to making good on PerformX's value proposition to this new client.

DISCOVERY

User Research and Interviews Revealed Pain Points in the Existing Credit and Rebate Order Process

I met remotely with our Client Operations Specialist, who had several years of experience working with the client’s program. She was responsible for processing the redemption orders and for responding to support requests from users.

Through interviewing her, observing her workflow, and studying emails received by the help desk, I identified pain points in the previous ordering system—for both the end users and the Ops team.

Chief among these was the high rate of Credit and Rebate orders that needed manual intervention to correct errors on the order forms. Not only was this extremely frustrating for the participants, it was very time-consuming and expensive for the client.

It appeared that many of the errors resulted from people misunderstanding the requirements and policies of the program:

• Confusing content — inconsistent terminology made some expectations unclear. One form even collected information that wasn’t needed to process the order!
• Layout and styling — form fields weren’t arranged logically; text styling made some parts confusing to read.
• System messaging and feedback — order forms could be submitted with missing or invalid information, causing delays and confusion.
• Instructional text — important requirements were buried in lengthy instructional emails that most users skipped.

DESIGN & PROTOTYPING

A Custom Feature from a Product Perspective

As the UX lead, part of my responsibility is to promote a product-perspective in the design of any new features.

The initial estimate of this feature, written prior to my involvement, envisioned it as a custom product extension, built as a one-off for this client. The approach essentially recreated the legacy forms within PerformX, in a way that would have created a user flow completely separate from the product's existing redemption and checkout experience.

This approach left me uncomfortable because it didn't address the usability and operational problems inherent to the legacy process, and it would have introduced unnecessary patterns and complexity to our product experience. 

I theorized that redesigning the checkout process in alignment with our product standards would naturally alleviate the major pain points.

• Simplified Forms:  Bring consistency and brevity to the microcopy and remove unnecessary inputs.
• Contextual Guidance:  Replace lengthy documentation with more granular, strategically placed instructional text.
• Messaging & System Feedback:  Enhance real-time validation and error messages to help prevent invalid or incomplete submissions.

I also had my eye on the potential business and strategic advantages of a redesign.

• Reduced Dev and QA hours:  Leveraging existing UI patterns would make it less expensive to build and test
• Scalability:  Even more non-merchandise reward types were on the product roadmap. If we were strategic about the Envu design, it could establish an extensible checkout pattern that would be useful for other clients.

My design seamlessly integrated the new functionality with the existing UI, maintaining a coherent checkout experience for all redemption types.

Since this approach used established UI patterns, it would also be quicker and cheaper to build.

STRATEGIZE & PIVOT

Negotiating a New Approach to Minimize Risk Amid Unforeseen Technical Challenges

When development started, we discovered that some of the front-end code needed to support the functionality of the new design wasn’t in place yet. This tech-debt was known to the Product team, but it wasn't in their plan for the current sprint. We needed to determine a way forward that could still deliver the feature on time.

Our delivery team was faced with a choice between waiting several months for the Product team to deliver the updated code, updating the code ourselves, or redesigning the redemption feature to work with the existing codebase.

• Waiting for the updates would have delayed the feature, which was not an option.
• Taking on the dev work was an appealing long-term strategy because it would have accelerated the product updates and avoided re-work in the future, but in the near-term the additional scope would have stretched resources on the delivery team and put other deliverables at risk.
• Redesigning meant more effort overall (extra design now, plus an extra round of dev and QA in the future when the original design could finally be implemented), but it posed the least risk to the initial launch.

I met with devs, tested and explored the capabilities of the existing framework in a QA environment, and estimated LoE and UX hours so the team could compare the costs associated with different design approaches. I also partnered with internal stakeholders to negotiate the scope of the feature and prioritize work that would de-risk the interim solutions.

The decision was made to pivot to a new design that could function within the current limitations.

This meant compromising on some product standards in the near-term, so I set out to devise a strategic design approach that would maximize the benefits of this effort by: 

• still relieving as many pain points as possible
• working around some of the usability problems inherent to the current framework
• minimizing future re-work by keeping the interim design as close as possible to the future state

My Envu Rewards launched on-schedule, hitting the accelerated deadline.

The new checkout interface fulfilled a record volume of point redemptions in the first month after launch.

• $5M worth of points were redeemed in the first six weeks after launch
• $4M of those were spent via the newly designed redemption feature