Glasy
Cash-back Mobile App and Introduction Landing Page
INTRODUCTION
Managing living expenses is one of the major problems of students today, on the other hand, there are many ways to get discounts and cash-back for each purchase. Glasy’s team is looking for a new method to find a meaningful relationship between these two and offer students a way to save more money.
By conducting research and examining the lifestyle of students at the University of Waterloo in Canada and running research related to cash-back businesses, we were able to design a mobile app and present it to students and merchants as a way to save their money and their time.
As a product designer, I leveraged the design thinking process and ran design sessions. I used low-fidelity wireframes to validate the ideas with the target group.
I designed a high-fidelity user interface along with the product prototype and a design system and also I designed and implemented a landing page to introduce the Glasy. My professional friends in the development team helped me to deliver the mobile application and finally designing an attractive mascot named Glasy was another one of the exciting parts of this wonderful project for me.
Target group:
A student who is looking to manage living expenses and save money
Duration:
Four months
Technology:
Microsoft Office, Balsamiq, Adobe XD, Zeplin, Adobe Illustrator, WordPress, HTML, CSS
Empathy with the students
To start this process, I needed to gather qualitative and quantitive data to get insights into students’ lifestyles and understand how they save money. To meet this need, I prepared a questionary and as I was working remotely, I asked the team to conduct interviews with several students of the University of Waterloo, Canada.
existing systems
The target group named the services they use to get cash-back and refunds. Students had pointed out problems they already have, but the need to get more detailed information from the existing methods led me to further investigate these businesses. Here are the list of these businesses:
Defining the RIGHT PROBLEM
I ran a problem-solving workshop with the Glasy team (Including management, marketing, sales & research people) then we analyzed all the data we had so we could find the right problems to solve.
Problems:
- The existing platforms are very time-consuming. The user has to spend a lot of time to receive a small amount (about two cents) of cash-back or discount coupons.
- Coupons are expired or not working.
- The minimum checkout limit is very annoying.
Ideation, test, and problem solving
According to the issues raised, I held and facilitated ideation sessions with the Glasy team, we tried to separate the strengths and weaknesses of each service, work on the weaknesses and use strengths as much as possible. Finally, I implemented the proposed ideas in the form of wireframes, made prototypes, and tested them with several university students. Almost 30% of the wireframes changed according to the feedback results.
Testing wireframes and UI prototypes with the students.
New user’s perspective
I leveraged my illustration power and designed an onboarding to properly familiarize new users with the special features of the Glasy. In order to personalize the Glasy cards and cash-back challenges, the user is asked to select the brands from which they intend to buy goods/services which could be modified later again in profile settings. The surprise comes appears when we give a golden card to the user at the end of the onboarding process which contains the most available cash-back from one of the favorite brands.
I illustrated the onboarding states that helps new user onboarding process.
A wild card is offered to the new user at the end of onboarding.
Home page
Here is where the user’s assets are, Glasy cards and the amount of received cash-back are right in front of the user’s eyes. They could access their wallet and change their preferences through the user profile section.
User wallet
The wallet is where the user can see the result of using Glasy and the amount of received cash-back and they can easily convert earned points into their bank account.
The MAGIC
I’ve found that the most important problem with the existing cash-back applications is the difficulty of earning a small amount of money! It is enough to add time consumption to this difficulty so that the user will completely forget about coming back to the application again.
Through the ideation sessions, the team helped me solve this. In the Glasy, with a powerful recommendation engine (which learns from users’ behavior over time), user will receive five chance cards by spending only 30 seconds per day! These cards could be added as an asset, given to a friend as a gift, or exchanged by selling to others. If you would like to get more cashback faster, then it is enough to participate in the newly designed brand league to increase your points. I also designed a leaderboard to motivate people to stay active in these challenges!
User will receive five chance cards by spending only 30 seconds per day!
Cards could be added as an asset, given to a friend as a gift, or exchanged by selling to others.
Brand Identity
Along with the design system, I designed a logo and a character as a mascot to help the marketing team to communicate better with the students as its target group. I designed a character as a mascot with the concept of glass and the shape of a coin. I’ve created more than five characters and tried to find the most attractive design! I’ve got a lot of feedback from people and with the help of the Reddit platform I received about 150 feedbacks for each one.
Introduction website
After completing the mobile application design, now it was time to introduce the Glasy to the target group as a solution to save their time and money. I designed a beautiful landing page, and the Glasy’s marketing team helped me to make it better and better. I started the process by designing a few simple wireframes and testing concepts and different voices & tones with a few people who were among the students and had no idea about the Glasy. After several iterations of design, I was able to get the best outcome.
Serving the teams
During the development of the Glasy mobile app, I worked with a professional team to get every asset they needed for development. I created the design system and cared about the colors, fonts, buttons, inputs, layouts, and variations. I got help from the marketing team to reach a suitable voice and tone to write the required messages.
Hands-on coding
As I’ve got knowledge of code and development, I implemented the Glasy landing page in WordPress and front-end programming (HTML, CSS, Flex). This saved a lot of time and the final result became exactly similar to what I’ve designed before as an interface. I used Hotjar service (a famous heatmap service) to get access to viewers’ behavior and get detailed insights to be able to improve my design in the future.
Final results & business values
By designing the Glasy, I proudly offered to students it as a better way to save time and money.
Glasy is a cash-back app that proactively offers the best offer to earn a profit from a purchase with a %100 chance while protecting users’ online data privacy. The final application has important features and the most important of which I will mention below:
- It changed the buying behavior of students by giving a suitable solutions in front of them.
- Designing gamification with cards and leagues made every second worthy. Only 30 seconds per day, will help the students to reach their goal of earning cashback from their desired brand. This addictive behavior caused users to return to the application every day of the week (more retention) and helped to increase the probability of purchasing goods or services of brands.
- Unlike other services, users’ shopping behavior data won’t cause them to see annoying ads and will end up benefiting them by giving them cash-back cards that are completely exclusive for each person.
- By designing the experience of buying and selling Glasy cards, users are very connected with each other and it helped them to create a community, which makes them spend more time on the application.
- Design innovations have caused students to have more trust in the Glasy and the Glasy helps to drive business loyalty, which as a result increases businesses’ trust in the Glasy and puts it ahead of the other competitors in the market.
Glasy character is memorable, helping the Glasy become more recognizable.
Behavioral Transformation through Gamification
Personalized Shopping Experience and User Loyalty
Community Building and Enhanced User Trust
For the future
The large number of brands that are already on the Glasy, made it difficult for us to provide a solution for businesses to promote on the Glasy because we have found such a large target group in front of us. Therefore, to solve this problem in the future, we will choose a sector of businesses and look for a way for the brands in that category. In this interval, we can also get good insights into the behavior and experience of the first version of the Glasy.
Finally, the Glasy will become a two-sided platform that has a buyer and seller side. We are looking to change the design to a solution that has these advantages for businesses:
- They will be able to define promotions for their goods or services.
- Make the advertising process very simple for them.
- Analysis of how much ROI (Return on investment) was received for each dollar of the given cash-backs.
- Increase customer loyalty for businesses.