Referral Programs Service

About

AI-tech company startup around referral programs creation and management codenamed "rechain"

My role

Hired as senior individual contributor I tasked to create MVP of an easy to use in-house solution

Pain points

There are plenty of referral programs software, however they didn't possess the needed features and intuitive interface. The design was to be built within tight deadline of 3 months in parallel with the development.

Headless design as no branding or even naming was there. It's a common starting point of many startups and Proof of Concept (PoC) stages.

Users

The service was aimed at two principal types of users. Referral program owners, who create and manage programs, mostly corporations or smaller companies. And the second — those who would promote the program to the business clients and earn rewards. They could also join and promote multiple programs at once.

Addressing complexity

The perceived interface complexity comes from the lack of experience in ways to accomplish things and this consequently discourages users. The learning curve may be quite steep as well. Quite often designers make an onboarding tutorial, tips near the buttons etc.

As learning is a cognitive heavy task by itself I've decided to go with program creation wizard as very friendly way to allow users to introduce to the core features AND get results immediately.

Program setup

Complexity of a referral program setup comes from a set of many simple details. The key is to not bury the controls too deep or in places that are not obvious. I've approached to this maintaining context as much as possible and used accordions for that.

Business roadmap: marketplace, ai-based recommendations, evolution of referral program essence per se.

To address timeframe and lack of branding: figma lib, wireframes, constant communication.

Managing many programs

Intentional usage of the service was management of multiple programs and an obvious solution to provide easy access to important data is creating dashboard and data widgets.

Business needs

Business roadmap: marketplace, ai-based recommendations, evolution of referral program essence per se.o address timeframe and lack of branding: figma lib, wireframes, constant communication.

Project challenges

To address timeframe and lack of branding: figma lib, wireframes, constant communication.

Navigation

navigation, bread crumbs

User roles, companies and end users

user roles aka departments
wizard to be designed last

Outcome

3-months delivery of scalable MVP with prototypes, roadmap and distinctive visual style.

Takeaways

coming soon