Design and build a closed-loop big data system that provided customer data to retailers and better in-store shopping experiences to consumers.
Index, acquired by Stripe in 2017, was a startup building a closed-loop system to allow brick-and-mortar stores to know each customer, and thereby personalize marketing communications to increase sales. The ecosystem had many touch points, each a requiring thoughtfully designed interface optimizing the needs of consumers, retailers, and payment processors.
The consumer experience comprises of the PIN pad, which was an iPad system running on Revel’s app, and a white label mobile app. The scope of the project was to create a quick, convenient, and secure experience that allows customers to earn rewards and redeem coupons as they checkout in-store.
The checkout experience originally asked mobile users to enter their PIN at checkout, but the second version recognized the user just by their credit card swipe.
The mobile app allowed users to clip coupons and view rewards. It is a product retailers often request as a way to engage with their customers. This app was an experiment to see how consumers will use the app as intended. For Cako, the brand was developed to match their kitchy brand.
The app allowed users to pay in-store merely by entering an “Index PIN” at checkout, after storing their credit card in the app. The app’s geolocation was used as a second factor of security to verify that a user was actually in the store at the time of purchase.
The Index PIN concept was not adopted widely, since people kept on forgetting their Index PINs. The app was redesigned to be used only for viewing rewards and coupons, which also eliminated the need for adding a credit card to the app, which increased adoption.
Index’s email marketing tool was designed to personalize content. A retailer can give customers unique product recommendations, coupons, rewards, etc, triggered by certain events that happen in-store or online.
The design process included interviews with our retail partners to see what kind of data and tools they would want in order to be competitive with their online counterparts, which helped us define the features in the marketing tool. From there, we developed the site architecture and wireframed the flows for each functions. A phasing strategy ensured that we were distributing our labor resources strategically while delivering new functions to our retail partners in a timely manner.
Retailers want to be have full control of their email designs. Our tool allowed them to do so while carving out areas for personalized content, which will be delivered by the Index engine when the email is sent.
The key benefit of Index is that it can measure campaign performance by tracking whether customers return to a physical store to make purchases following a promotion.
In addition to the ecosystem, I was also responsible for designing the Index website. Since Index was an ecosystem with many different products and experiences within that, the biggest challenge was to clearly summarize what Index does.
