My mission at Student Beans

“We want our users to come back to the app as much as possible”

Student Beans is the world’s leading student loyalty network. It’s a marketing technology company that helps brands and services to run their own student discount and loyalty programmes to connect with over 163 million students across 52 countries to drive student sales. Student Beans grow student revenue for their clients by enabling student specific loyalty programmes via their web, mobile and instore channels to increase customer conversions. This includes verifying student customers, facilitating the redemption of a student specific incentive and onsite/in app/instore optimisation.

I joined Student Beans as a Senior Product Designer and joined the Bidoof squad which was part of the Retention department. I worked alongside a Product Manager to build the squad and the strategy, few weeks after an Android engineer, a iOs engineer, a tech lead and a scrum master joined us to tackle some problems.

We conduct several a customer research to first understand our users.

We made the conclusion that the user wasn’t using the app frequently and try to do understand why and how we would bring the user to come back.

Our mission was to retain our users with these 5 statements that will lead us to define the goals of our squad.

Our goals :

1.  I want see brands and offers I wouldn’t have thought of
2. I want to find and keep track of brands and offers I like the most
3.  I want to feel Student Beans is valuable to me
4.  I want to feel I can trust Student Beans
5. I don’t want to have to trawl discount sites and google when I have something in my basket

After spending weeks conducting a user research in order to understand what the user needs and want, we decided to focus on the second opportunity which was :

‘I want to find and keep track of brands and offers I like the most’

The best way to do it?

Having a direct access to the brands and being able to follow each brands like that the user is able to be alert when one of his favorite brand is adding a new offer.

This will drive the user to come back to the app.

The first step was to add some entry points in the app, but also alerts notification and emails every time that a new offer will be added.

Wireframes

Our experimentation was really successful and the brand page were live and released in the app, it was time to think about the next step and how we would integrate the follow brands in the explore page, but also in the app in order to help user to have a direct access to the brands he likes when he is coming back the app.

Follow brands v1 

I’ve designed high fidelity designs of the flow to put in front of the users.

I conducted 10 unmoderated user testing where the user had a script that the user follows and speak out loud about the flow with some open questions at the end.

The main features are:

• Introducing a favorites tab where the user would be able to access to the brands that he/she is following but also the favorite offers that he has saved. (The data showed us that this tab wasn’t really used much)
• Introducing a favorites list page where the user will be able to keep a track on all the brands that he is following, the user will also be able to unfollow or follow.
• Move the follow CTA to the brand page.

The main questions were:

1. Why do you use Student Beans?
2. How frequent do you use Student Beans?
3. What would make you use Student Beans more often if you don’t return to the app frequently?
4. Can you look at the bottom nav and tell me what each tab means?
5. What do you expect to see when you click to the “favorites” tab?
6. Can you click on an offer and tell us what you see, and talk us through to what you can do.
7. Click on the brand page.
8. Can you talk us through what you can do on the brand page.
9. What do you expect to happen after you are following a brand?
10. Would you like to see more when you are following a brand?
11. Is it easy for you to find where the brands you are following are?
12. Do you have anything to add about the follow brand feature?