In the summer of 2017, I was selected to be part of a four-person team tasked with completely reimagining Shop Your Way, Sears' rewards program, from the ground up. I worked with two UX researchers and a UX architect to devise an entirely new web experience, the goal of which was to simplify the program and make the concepts of points, earning and redeeming simple and straightforward. I did this visually by using friendly, familiar language, bright colors and a cheerful illustration style. The team worked in an agile environment, with daily standups and whiteboarding sessions, and bi-weekly presentations to the Senior Vice President of Customer Experience and Integrated Retail.
We created high-fidelity comps for a new Homepage, How It Works page, Account dashboard and Collections, a highly curated experience designed to inspire the user by serving up selections of relevant products based on data collected on their activity and interests.
There was a strong desire to make the site shoppable, and not just a place members came to check their balance. Thus the top navigation was tuned to prioritize features that user feedback told us were leveraged the most: the Search bar and the Departments drill down. We also wanted to emphasize Partners, which allowed people to shop top brands like Nike and Apple.
Two priorities for the homepage were providing multiple clear CTAs to join, and adding the "real members" section to provide potential new members with quick, tangible examples of the program's value—to put real faces to the broad ideas being presented.
For the member dashboard, we knew we needed to spell out terms like Points and Surprise Offers to make it crystal clear how these worked. I chose some playful and vibrant illustrations, keeping with the bright color scheme I'd developed, to imbue the page with a sense of fun and ease. Pending Points are also well defined in order to make the concept evident and limit confusion.
These Collections pages show an example of another core idea of the redesign, the Member Bar. The aim here was to give a quick hitter of Points and Offers, and to make it highly interactive; if the user navigated to a page with a relevant offer they could use, the Member Bar would trigger a popup notification to alert them of the savings. The bar also allows quick access to the full Dashboard.
Collections were an idea we had in response to the reality that Shop Your Way, like Amazon, boasts an ocean of products that can easily overwhelm a member. Collections allow users to search highly curated sets of products based on their interests, winnowing out the best selections for a given project or event. Each Collection would be authored by an expert, to enhance the feeling of reliability.