Nordstrom Rewards for the Nordstrom App

Overview

Nordstrom customers who use the Nordstrom App are the most engaged and the highest spenders, and are the most likely to also be Nordstrom Rewards members. Yet before 2015, App customers did not have access to their Reward information. I was asked to design a brand new way for customers to interact with their Nordstrom Rewards benefits within the App.

Results

Loyalty features in the App were launched on March 30, 2015. The three new features were the Nordstrom Rewards Dashboard, which allowed customers to see their benefits and progress towards Nordstrom Notes, Digital Notes, which allowed customers to view and use their App in stores to redeem Notes earned, and Note Notifications, which sent a push notification to customers when they were near a Nordstrom store and had a Note to spend. The combined features improved App CSAT scores, reduced contacts to call centers, and helped to drive in-store trips.

Partners

UX Writing, UX Research, Product Management, Engineering, Loyalty

Roles

User Experience, User Interface, Prototyping, Visual Design, Production

The Problem

On nordstrom.com, an existing web dashboard served as the starting point for the app dashboard. While the dashboard received little traffic on the site, it provided valuable information about the data available to us and design constraints we would be up against. The existing dashboard was text heavy, difficult to parse, and even more difficult to comprehend.

The existing dashboard on Nordstrom.com from 2014.

Next, I worked directly with my Product Manager and UX Writer to whiteboard the user flows based on the customer state. The concept of the dashboard seemed simple at first, but there were many states a customer could be in and we had to account for all of them.

Ideation

After determining what screens would potentially be needed, I started sketching at a relatively small size to help generate lots of ideas rapidly.

As we started to narrow down dashboard ideas, I gradually increased the fidelity. We held several wall critiques with several stakeholders to surface issues and any concerns with the design direction.

The final dashboard design was chosen based on the visual points progress and clean information hierarchy. Despite displaying a lot of information, it felt scannable and appropriate in a mobile context.

Digital Notes Exploration

Concurrently, our team was also thinking about how to translate paper Notes into a digital experience. Since the majority of Notes issued to customers were physical and mailed to customers, I wanted to make sure there was a family resemblance between physical and digital.

Like the dashboard, the Digital Notes went through several rounds of iteration, critique, and changes based on technical limitations.

Prototyping & Usability Testing

I created a prototype for an in-house study with 6 participants. Participants liked the visual representation of the information provided to them on the dashboard. They were easily able to navigate around the dashboard without any problems. However, none of the participants understood the points balance section and made different and incorrect assumptions about it.

The results of the study gave us an opportunity to simplify and reduce complexity further. In the study, we learned that customers really cared about was how close they were to their next Note. That information was grouped closer to the progress bar itself and we removed the points balance because it was confusing and not important to customers.