7-Eleven

The Brand:

7-Eleven is the world's largest chain of convenience stores with over 65,000 stores in 18 countries. They have 55 million customers in stores on a daily basis, and conducts 20 billion transactions annually.

The Product:

The 7-Eleven Rewards Platform allows users to accrue points to apply towards their favorite food or drinks. The program lives in the form of Native App and Responsive Web. Between the iOS and android apps, there are over 12 million users on the app. The iOS app is currently #25 in Food & Drink category and has over 61,000 reviews.

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My Role:

T3 is responsible for Strategy, User Experience, Design, Development, and Maintenance. For this project, I was one of two Product Designers on the 7-Eleven team. We handled virtually anything that touched the website or the iOS/ android apps. I spent the majority of time in and out of my account page and dashboard. During that time I worked with with the Product Manager, Development, and QA Managers to ensure deliverables were met and quality of design was maintained.

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Product Features:

While I worked on a number of projects during my time on this team, there are two that I consider significant; First, a restructuring of 7-Eleven’s Offer, Coupon, and Promotions. Second, Account Creation, Login, and Email Verification Process.  

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Offer, Coupon and Promotion Restructuring:

Initial challenge/problem

7-Eleven’s App was lacking flow. They wanted a more organized way to help their users easily access their Coupons and Rewards while still highlighting the store’s newest promotions. Starting with a four tab layout, they were considering combining two or losing one, but weren’t quite sure how to attack it.

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Breaking down/abstracting the problem to core fundamentals

We approached this by looking at the four tabs individually—Home, Bonus Points, Deals, and My Rewards. As it was, Promotions and Coupons were grouped, while Bonus Points stood alone. After breaking these tabs down individually, we decided that Coupons and Bonus Points were most important to the consumer because that meant instant savings for them—why not have those together? Promotions, on the other hand, seemed to have a more vague appeal. We figured that one could stand alone.

We concluded that moving Promotions to the homepage made the most since— not to mention their website already effectively reflected this formatting. The only problem was, the homepage was already pretty full. To solve this, we added a hidden drop down menu (directly under those freshly accrued points) which with the flick of a thumb, could expand with all the latest offers. Problem solved.

Putting it back together

Now, we were down to three simple tabs; Home, Offers (previously Bonus Points and Deals), and My Rewards.

Next up, the redesign of the new Offer Screen layout. We wanted to get this right, so we explored a lot of different options. We found that it would be the most exciting/ beneficial to show the customer immediately what items they could already afford with their points. Along with this automatic personalized landing page, we added a filtration system at the top of the screen, where consumers can control exactly how specific they want their Bonus Offer/ Coupon search to be. They can even select if they want to look at Coupons or Bonus Offers exclusively. We didn’t want the two types to become confused however, being on the same screen. So, to mix it up, we made the coupons look like coupons, (black-dotted-border and all) and added a light grey background to the Bonus Offers. Done, done, and done.

Account Creation, Login and Verification:

Initial challenge/problem

7-Eleven was losing money and a lot of it. At the time, they had a large number of users who would create multiple new accounts, receive multiple registration bonus offers (of 600 reward points) and in-turn redeem those points for food and/or drinks. There was no way to verify that the emails that they were using were in-fact real. So, they came to us (T3), as their agency of record and strategic partner and asked us to fix it.

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Research

We begun by gathering the technical requirements and existing user flows. We worked with the technical architect and engineers to figure out what the best solution would be from a technical standpoint. From there, we looked at what other companies were doing for their verification process.

Solution

The solution seemed relatively simple. Just add an additional step to the registration and make the user verify their email to redeem their points. And for existing users, we would just lock them out of their account until they verified there account. Boom. Problem solved.

The hiccup

As we begun to comp out the flows for the different users we realized that the current Account ID wasn’t editable. This was a problem because we knew that not all users would have access to their email accounts. So, we decided that there needed to be two emails attached to the account: one for the uneditable account ID and another that they could edit. After consulting with the client we decided that the second email would be used for their email and SMS communication. Now, from a user experience perspective this is problematic.

Going above and beyond

At this point we decided it would be best to step back and take a look at the registration, log-in, password reset, account verification and email update process from start to finish.