Helping users create an impact with donation rewards.
Benevity App / 2023
About
Many Benevity client programs offer their employees donation “rewards” - money that is earned for volunteering and is used to donate to charities. However, many of our users didn’t know what rewards were, how to access them or how to use them. This project tackled that problem by introducing the concept of the Rewards Page.
My Role
UX/UI Design and Research (I collaborated with a Lead Designer on the workshop.)
The Team
Product Manager, Software Developer Manager, 4 Mobile developers and Content Designer
Users Don’t Understand What Rewards Are
For a long time, Benevity has received feedback from our end users that rewards are confusing. This problem area was exciting because it wouldn’t just improve the user experience - since rewards are set to expire, our Product Manager determined that from Oct 2021 - Nov 2022: $138M (42%) in rewards expired. (That would translate to $4M in platform revenue!) Knowing how much money was not being donated to charities in need and how much it could help improve business health, we knew we wanted to kick off this project as soon as we could.
I wanted to back up this quantitative data with user feedback from Aha. Here is what our users were saying about rewards:
“I have $82 in rewards but do not understand how to use them. Please explain that process.”
“I have earned a reward and I’m not sure how to get this to a charity. Can you send me directions?”
“Can I use the remaining $300 volunteer reward to donate to my favourite cause? If so, how do I make the donation?”
“I do not understand the rewards tab.”
“ I had no idea these rewards were ‘give-able.’”
“When I try to use rewards for a donation, it is not an option.”
"Hello, I was planning to donate from my $500 reward in Nov, as I saw expiration in Nov. However, when I am looking at now it actually expired just few days before. Can you please help so I can use that money for good cause."
“I was granted a $25 rewards without having done any volunteer work. Why is that?”
“Hi, my account says I have active rewards for volunteer time I have tracked. What do I do with them? And how do I allocate them?” This user had $720 in rewards!
“I was awarded this $500 from my volunteering time this year. How do I assign the reward to the organization of my choice?”
Currently in the mobile app, when a user goes to view more information about their rewards, it simply takes them to a history of the rewards they have received. It was not surprising that users found this experience to be confusing and unhelpful.
This feedback helped me realize that it wasn’t just one aspect of using rewards that was not connecting to the user - it starts from understanding the concept of rewards to making the donation. Since this was such a large area of opportunity, my Product Manager and I decided to pull the entire Mobile team together for a three day workshop to brainstorm solutions. I wanted to make sure our developers were in this workshop as it helps determine feasibility early on and allows for a new perspective on the issue.
Workshop: Determining Areas of Opportunity
Approach: Since we had solid data on the problem, this workshop was focused on determining areas of opportunities for Donation Rewards with the Mobile team. The approach was as follows:
Create outcome statements to define what outcome we want to achieve and determine how we will measure it.
Outline a detailed user journey to better understand the current experience and dive deeper into the pain points of using rewards.
Create an opportunity tree that aligns with our outcome statement. This allows us to brainstorm without constraint and then vote on the most valuable/feasible opportunities as a team.
Our outcome statement was “Spark users can redeem more rewards resulting in increased user satisfaction and increased revenue.”
Results: After 3 days together, the team landed on these to 5 areas of opportunity that was a balance of notification and in-app work. These areas were a balance of high impact and high feasibility work.
Combine total rewards expiring on a day into one expiry notification (If a user submitted 20 time track requests and an admin approved them in one day, they would receive 20 emails!)
Add a 24 hour expiring email (We currently only had 10 day expiry email)
Move the “You’ve received rewards” message to our new notification platform and add tracking
Create an in-app experience when rewards are received
Create better visibility for the user when their balance is expiring
I didn’t expect this workshop to result in so much notification work but I’m glad it did. The notification work was a great “quick win” to achieve while I worked on designing the app experience.
The final opportunity tree where we voted as a team on the most valuable and feasible ideas.
Designing for the Novice User
I began the wireframing process by directly pulling from the journey maps and areas of opportunities from the workshop. This helped to ensure my designs were being grounded by this discovery work and centered around the user.
My main goal with this design was to cater towards a new user who knows nothing about their program or what rewards are, and the expert user who already knows what they want to donate to. The fact about our products are that most users only log in once a year around the time of their program’s largest campaign. So I had to design this with a very novice user group in mind.
My design approach was to eliminate a long and overwhelming table of numbers that lacked context and clarity. Instead, the new design broke down everything the user needs to know about rewards - from their current balance, to recommendations for charities.
Usability Testing and Reigning in Scope
I conducted 8 usability tests through User Interviews. I had participants describe to me what they thought rewards were, find their expiring rewards and make a donation with rewards. The results were very positive:
6 of 8 participants correctly described the difference between funds and rewards
8 of 8 participants correctly found the expiring rewards section
8 of 8 participants correctly completed a donation using rewards
After reviewing the results with the rest of the Mobile team, an issue arose: We couldn’t properly recommend eligible charities for users to donate with rewards because the Search team didn’t have capacity to help us.
Initially my team felt we could leave this and come back once the Search team had capacity. But instead, I advocated for putting user’s favourite causes here, which would be a likely choice for a donation. It was also a great opportunity to create a proper empty state for favourite causes where the user will be encouraged to go save a cause as a favourite.
With all these iterations complete, this was the final rewards experience:
Reflection: Bring Development in Early
Since the launch of the rewards page, the percentage of rewards redeemed has improved significantly.
March - May 2022 (Pre redesign):
37.34% of rewards were redeemed
March - May 2023 (Post redesign):
53.33% of rewards were redeemed
That’s a 15.99% difference! This project taught me how valuable it can be to bring in development early on in the process. By having the entire team in the workshops we were able to tackle technical uncertainties right away and ensure opportunities that were both valuable and feasible. If I could do this again, I would also bring in developers from the Search team to gain their perspective from a recommendations perspective. Overall, I’m very proud of this project and am so happy the work is being continued by another team for the web experience.