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Overview:

RewardCoin was the first stop in my entrepreneurial journey. We were a team of two. My brother was the front and back end developer, we worked together on the business development parts, and I was everything else: Branding, marketing, product research, product design, and whatever else might have come up. My experience with anything related to graphic or product design before RewardCoin was minimal, to say the least. I had never used the Adobe suite before, and I had made one website on Wix. By the time we would move on from RewardCoin, I had learned how to use Illustrator, After Effects, Photoshop, and had learned the ins and outs of creating assets to be used within an actual responsive mobile app. We did not take the leanest or most efficient path to the end result of realizing RewardCoin wasn’t going to work out, but the path we did take was extremely beneficial for my development as a graphic and product designer.

This case study is a high-level overview of the 2 years of work that went into RewardCoin. If you would like more detailed insight into our process, let me know and I would be happy to share that with you.

Roles:

UX Designer
UI Designer
Illustration/Animation
Business Development

Problem:

Existing reward programs do not provide restaurants access to the customers that they need access to the most: occasional customers. This communication gap created lost value for both the restaurants and the consumers.

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Insights

Most large restaurants chains at the time did NOT have mobile rewards programs and the most popular ones were still barely being used for mobile ordering.

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Solution

We built a coalition rewards program and mobile app to bring different restaurants under one loyalty program to bridge the communication and incentive gap between those restaurants and their occasional customers.

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Limitations

Neither my brother nor I had ever done anything resembling building a mobile app or a business. We both learned on the fly in every area from the business plan to the app design and functionality.

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Brand/UI Design

We wanted the design of RewardCoin to be a few things: unique, nostalgic, exciting and futuristic.

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UX Design

The RewardCoin app had 3 tabs along with a QR code tab to be scanned at restaurants to redeem a reward. We decided there were 4 main user tasks that we wanted to prioritize. Here are the details of the different pages in the app and the different tasks a user would be doing on a regular basis:

Marketing

We built a pitch deck and a duel pitch and product video for showing to potential investors and partners. The pitch video is a comprehensive overview of RewardCoin, from the problems we were solving to the details of the solution we provided. I recommend watching the video in order to best understand what we were building.

Conclusion

RewardCoin was essentially my introduction to product and graphic design. Throughout the nearly 2 years that we worked on RewardCoin, I worked and became proficient in the Adobe Suite and learned how to create and export assets for a mobile app. We designed an entire rewards program, met with and pitched national restaurant chain executives, and got to experience everything that goes with starting a business and trying to take it from zero to one. Ultimately we were “unsuccessful” but I learned valuable skills and discovered my passion for product design.  

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Or, if you would rather contact me by email, you can reach me at blake.alderink@gmail.com
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