Make Product a Habit
Yahoo's loyalty program lets users easily discover, interact with, and earn rewards through daily challenges in the Yahoo app.
Summary
⛳️ Goal
Convert lightweight users into active members
💪 Role
Lead designer - UX, UI, Prototype.
🧑🤝🧑 Team
Collaborated with a growth team of 20 members across Product, Marketing, Data Analytics, Customer Support, and Operations.
🗓️ When
2018 (Launch) - 2020
🏆 Outcome
✔︎ The first loyalty program framework across TW Yahoo Media services.
✔︎ Increased Yahoo app's login rate by 1.75 times.
✔︎ Chose as the "Best in user experience" project at Yahoo's global tech conference In 2019
🤔 Challenge
In 2018, 7 million users were visiting Yahoo sites every day in Taiwan, but only 1/3 would log in and interact with our services.
User studies indicated that a significant proportion of “Lightweight“ users come to our site to kill time or read news as part of their daily routines, but they did not develop a connection with our brand and services.
💭 How might we
Make users' daily routines more meaningful and interesting?
We believe that small things like content consuming and checking daily information are meaningful, and each user’s contribution should accumulate into an achievement.
This belief led us to create the loyalty program in Yahoo App.
📝 Design process
Collect past data and user research insights to identify problem statement.
Clarify expectations and align project objectives with stakeholders through brainstorming sessions.
Initiated focus group interviews to understand user insights and test the early concept design.
Based on the user insights to define userflow, wireframes, and create high-fidelity prototypes.
Conduct usability test with demo apps for design enhancements.
Keep tracking data for iterations.
💡Design Strategy
Form user habit with the “Hook”
To build and scale products that people love, we utilized Nir Eyal’s Hook theory to design the user journey. Many world-changing products, such as Instagram or YouTube, have integrated the four steps of forming user habits: Trigger, Action, Variable Reward, and Investment.
We believe that users will be triggered to understand and experience our product, then take action to receive variable rewards.
Once they enjoy the sense of accomplishment and fulfillment, they will invest more time in our product and increase their engagement with our core values through the cycle.
Design Strategy - 2Connect users with our core value
Most of our users only browse in the Home tab and won’t try other features. Therefore, we created the Tasks page to introduce and educate the users on the new features outside of their daily routines.
In the end, the tasks page has the highest click rate among other pages in the Member tab — Users consider it their starting point for discovery.
Design Strategy - 3Make users feel rewarded
After users receive reward points, they can redeem e-vouchers or physical products. It was the first time we implemented a transaction-like experience in Yahoo's media services. As a result, we dedicated significant effort, involving product managers, operations teams, front-end, and back-end engineers, to complete the redemption flow.
🎨 Visual branding
Yahoo loyalty program is welcoming, optimistic, and exciting.
We took inspiration from the classic Yahoo messenger’s emoji sticker to create the icon for loyalty points. I provided guidelines including:
GUI and key visuals for marketing campaigns
Sketch library for internal team
Guideline for external partners
Yahoo messenger’s emoji sticker
Evaluation
🤖 From data
User engagement can be stimulated by a loyalty program:
✔︎ Login rate increased by 1.75 times.
✔︎ Users who actively engaged with the loyalty program revisit Yahoo App more than 5 days every week.
✔︎ Users’ time-spend doubled in 6 months after the program launched.
🩷 From users
We received positive feedback from user studies in 🇹🇼 Taipei, 🇭🇰 Hong Kong, 🇦🇺 Sydney, 🇬🇧 London, and 🇫🇷 Paris, especially in two aspects:
Users are happy to discover new features through the tasks.
“I will do the "Complete an online poll" challenge because it allows me to know the majority's opinion. I can get loyalty points and useful information at the same time.“
— Miss Lu, Age 30
Users appreciate the rewards that benefit their daily life.
“The loyalty points are huge motivation! I have coffee and read the article every morning while commute. The challenges encourage me to read more and express my own opinion on Yahoo, and I can get a free coffee.”
— Miss Hsieh, Age 34
🚀
From pioneering to a scalable ecosystem
Yahoo Loyalty Program demonstrated the success of a task-reward system in driving user engagement. Building on these results, we expanded the program across multiple Yahoo services to boost cross-platform traffic.
Loyalty program in Yahoo Mail Desktop
Loyalty program in Yahoo Shopping App
Global Recognition & Impact
Yahoo loyalty program was chosen as the "Best in user experience" project in the 2019 Tech Pulse — Yahoo's global tech conference in Sunnyvale, CA. We presented this project at Yahoo’s headquarters.
I'm proud that Taiwan team’s initiative demonstrate a global impact, pushing me to pursue more global-scale projects and collaborations.
Presentation at Santa Clara Convention Center.
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