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:

Problem:

The primary problem is a gap in communication between businesses and their customers/potential customers, specifically between restaurants and consumers.
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Since the creation of the app store, rewards programs (if they function as mobile apps) are even more powerful. Restaurants can track the frequency and details of a customer’s visits, send personalized offers, utilize push notifications, and more. The problem is that the customers that download branded rewards apps are already the most loyal customers, meaning there is still a communication gap between restaurants and everyone else, making it difficult to turn occasional customers into loyal customers.

There is also a data gap, meaning restaurants only have purchase data on their most loyal customers, and therefore are unable to use purchase data from their more infrequent customers in order to send them personalized offers. Bridging this communication and data gap would be mutually beneficial, as the restaurants would be willing to offer great value to occasional customers to get them to come in more frequently. So how do we bridge that gap and allow restaurants and consumers to capture that potential value?

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.

Insights

At the time that we were working on RewardCoin (2017-2018), rewards apps for restaurants were still a relatively novel concept. Starbucks had their rewards app (digital ordering was still relatively new, 4% of sales compared to 24% of sales in Q4 of 2020) and it was (and still is) regarded as the best in the industry. Chick-Fil-A had just released mobile order and a new rewards program in 2016. Whataburger had just released its first mobile app in 2016, as well.

Notable restaurant chains without rewards programs at the time (some still do not have one): Mcdonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Pei Wei, Chili’s (no  mobile app digital rewards program), Cold Stone Creamery.

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.

Solution

Restaurants are a high-frequency, high-loyalty industry, which makes them a perfect focus for a coalition loyalty program. Our solution was to create an industry-specific, proprietary coalition loyalty program for restaurants.

We built a program to bring together restaurants from different food & beverage categories (1 from each category) under one loyalty program to share customers.  Throughout the process of designing and creating the loyalty program, we consulted with people in executive roles at some of the restaurants we were targeting with our program in order to ensure we were building something that was useful and made sense from the restaurants’ perspective.

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.

Limitations

Our biggest limitation came from our own inexperience. We had never built an app before, let alone try to build a company, raise money, market a product. RewardCoin was our first time to do anything like this, so everything we did was a learning experience.

We were a two-person team so in certain situations design quality took a backseat to functionality. Also, all in-app animations are implemented using Lottie, so the intricacies of the animations themselves are limited by the limitations of what translates from After Effects into JSON using Lottie (e.g. After Effects “effects” are not compatible with Lottie).

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.

Brand/UI Design

The RewardCoin brand was designed to both be a nostalgic callback to old school arcades while also having a futuristic feel that matched the novelty of what RewardCoin could do as a rewards program.  The coin animations look like they are right out of an early 2000’s video game, while the logo, along with the gradients, glowing effects and details are reminiscent of a futuristic cyberpunk aesthetic.

More than anything, I wanted RewardCoin to be DIFFERENT. Of course, our entire reward program’s design was different than anything that existed at the time, and you can see more about that here. Most rewards and loyalty programs at the time felt transactional, boring, and confusing. I wanted RewardCoin to be fun and simple, the way getting a reward should feel.  

Since we were building out a fully functional mobile app, every design element was done with the end in mind, as opposed to creating a prototype that would then be translated into the final product. I did all of the animations using the After Effects Lottie extension, and the app was completely responsive on both Apple and Android devices. Here is a look at the RewardCoin brand and some of the pieces of the app that we thought made it special.

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

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.