Project: Yoyo Wallet Native App
Client: Yoyo Wallet
Designer: Ryan Younger
Year: 2013
CHALLENGE: Design and research an innovative and convenient loyalty card UI which could be used by time-limited consumers and increase brand loyalty whilst reducing the administrative overhead on retailers.
RESULT: Yoyo received significant investment following the new design (over £12 million pounds in round B funding). The app tested very well and users found it intuitive and more fun to use than traditional loyalty cards. Caffe Nero went on to adopt the Yoyo platform for their own digital loyalty card scheme.
Yoyo payments was an early-to-market payments app which successfully executed on the idea of a digital loyalty card. I led the design of both the native app for the consumer experience and the website and app for the admin experience.
Consumer experience
The consumer experience incorporated best practice design approaches (for the time, in 2013) and had to account for radical changes in Apple’s iOS as they shifted to a more minimal, or ‘flat’, design eschewing the previous skeuomorphic approach they had taken. For example, the payment screen was originally designed to be opened with a swipe gesture from the bottom of the screen, however, Apple decided to use this gesture as a system-wide method of pulling up often used system settings so the design had to be adapted, despite testing well in research with that method. UX research was undertaken often with students at Imperial College who were involved in financing and supporting the development of the app. This allowed for quick and dirty hallway-intercept testing and allowed the acquisition of feedback quickly throughout iterations.





Admin experience
Subsequent to designing the consumer experience I moved onto undertaking research and then designing an experience for admins who would be comprised of restaurant owners, cafe owners, and other shops participating in the Yoyo rewards experience. The admin panel would allow them to view data and visualisations showing metrics such as sales, rewards redeemed, number of customers using the app, and the date, time and location of purchases and redemptions.

UX research
Usablity testing was undertaken from the start of the project and continued through each design iteration. Being in a partnership with Imperial College allowed for an easily accessible audience of students as research subjects on an ad-hoc basis. Concurrent think-aloud protocol was utilised using a hallway-intercept (guerilla) recruitment model. This research proved essential in testing hypotheses around the design method and elaborating on other aspects of the design approach and features.
Press

