APPetite: Using Dining Cashback Rewards with Ease
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Julie Vo
Jolie Ren
Prototyping
Design Strategy
Miro
Every nearby restaurant with an active offer is visible, so you can see where your cards can earn you rewards. APPetite automatically links your existing card offers and shows them on the map.
All your dining rewards, right on the map.
Rewards are grouped by urgency. “Expiring Soon” surfaces deals ending soon so you won't miss out on these benefits.
Your linked cards are ranked based on usage and rewards activity, with a summary of total savings and deals per card.
Deals are prioritized automatically.
Track your rewards and savings.
Competitive Analysis
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I conducted a competitive analysis to confirm that our app design was unique. Based on these interests, I chose to engage with 3 similar apps: CardPointers, InKind, and The Fork.
Reflecting on our findings, there is no single solution that uniquely addresses the features and concerns that meet our users’ needs. My design was built on location and situational intelligence, whereas existing designs were centered around the card rewards themselves.
Finally, I devised the design goal:
Create an app that enables users to more easily use their best available dining cashback offers during checkout, and allow credit card users to search for rewards based on location.
Home/Maps
Gives the user the most convenient way to search and use their cash back rewards for restaurants on the go, taking advantage of situational intelligence in our design.
Savings
Users could see their savings progress and a list of transactions.
Cards
Users’ cash back rewards are automatically added after linking their bank account(s), saving the headache of having to search within each banking app and add the reward manually.
Ideation: Wireframes
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Here are the wireframes that I sketched, based on my design goals and features that we’ve delineated above. I chose to focus on the following main pages for the app’s global navigation:
Branding
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I spent time building a fresh, modern color palette— purple, green, and orange — to design our app. After researching trends that were popular among users in our demographic, I came up with the branding guidelines below:
In our logo, I wanted to capture the ideas of “savings,” “cashback,” and “dining.” The logo displays four chairs around a percent sign, representing diners sitting at a table, in the shape of a clover, representing good fortune.
Here were some of the rejected logo ideas that didn’t quite fit the mood I wanted to capture with APPetite:
Usability Testing and Feedback
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We conducted usability testing with our hi-fi prototypes on two individuals in their mid-20s. In our tests, we were looking to see if users were able to complete the task flow in accessing their rewards, based on their real-time location. We were curious if there were other pain points that we may have missed in our research. Here were the results:
Participant 1:
Noted the intuitiveness of their experience: the interfaces were easy to follow, and they felt compelled to engage with the interfaces further.
Found the visualization at the top of the screen in the ‘Savings’ page useful because it provided quick insights into their transaction activities. They noted that the banking apps don’t have such visualizations upfront, which would take them more time to find.
Participant 2:
Was particularly interested in the visualizations on the ‘Savings’ page: seeing graphs that summarize spending details quickly gave them insights into saving activities.
Highlighted the importance of visual contrast in the graphs and the facets across interfaces: stronger contrast between items that are close to each other helped them stand out more.
Overall, both participants noted the abundance of contextual information for each page, which was engaging but not overwhelming or disruptive.
Takeaways
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Working with ambiguous problems. As my group’s prompt was broad, we had the freedom to be creative with our solution. I learned to prioritize important insights from irrelevant ones, determining which problems are important and which ones are insignificant to tackle within nine weeks.
Embrace the joy of the process. After all, having fun with this design process was how my group and I were able to discover insights that wouldn’t have been uncovered if we were more rigid in our approach. For instance, the idea of automating adding rewards into APPetite came much later, while we were building our hi-fi prototypes.
