Helping people and organisations shop, save and give, with Doing Good Rewards. 

Doing Good Rewards was preparing to launch a new employee rewards platform - a web and mobile app designed to help people shop, save, and donate with ease. The platform provided a smart solution for businesses looking to meet their CSR objectives by enabling employees to support charities through everyday purchases.
Users could link their credit card to the app, shop in person at participating retailers (like their local café), receive a small discount, and automatically donate a portion of their discount to a charity of their choice. This model created value for both businesses and employees by aligning incentives with social impact.
As part of a lean UX team of three, I contributed to the end-to-end design and development of the full web and app experience. This case study will touch on two key areas of work:
  • Onboarding Simplification: Redesigning the sign-up flow and landing page experience to address a bounce rate of over 90%.
  • Check-Out Simplification: Streamlining the in-app purchase experience for users to ensure clarity, trust, and ease of use.

Solution

We delivered a fully branded web and app experience designed to build trust, boost engagement, and drive action.

We designed a web experience that clearly communicated the platform’s value proposition, resulting in a bounce rate reduction of over 30% and an increase in user sign-ups. 
To help users understand the complex DGR model, we designed a personalised, step-by-step onboarding flow that simplified the concept, built trust, and improved comprehension from the outset.
The app experience was crafted to allow users to discover local in-store deals, purchase gift cards, and buy event tickets - all within a single interface.
Throughout the experience, we remained focused on the users needs - reinforcing their savings and impact on their chosen charity at every stage to create a journey that informs, empowers, and converts.

Discover

Research wasn’t originally in scope, so we started by reviewing analytics and customer feedback from the pilot to create a lean persona. 

The persona was a strategic tool - designed not only to represent the user, but to build empathy and prompt discussion within the product team. It helped us frame key experience gaps and paved the way to map the current journey. 
Most importantly, it was instrumental in securing buy-in to conduct further user research and better understand the needs driving our design decisions.

Building on the lean persona, I created a journey map to illustrate the onboarding experience from the user's perspective. 

This helped the team visualise pain points, highlight gaps in our understanding, and make a compelling case for why further research was essential.
By drawing from analytics, customer feedback, and stakeholder input, the map painted a clear picture of where the experience was falling short. It helped the leadership team see the opportunity for impact. Most importantly, it successfully secured buy-in to conduct user research and begin shaping a new, evidence-based onboarding flow.

With the research budget secured, we shifted our focus to reimagining the onboarding experience. 

Our goal was to create a new user flow that we could quickly test and validate with users.
We held an ideation session, using Jane’s journey as a lens to spark ideas. The focus wasn’t on perfecting the flow, but on identifying key moments - resolving pain points and highlighting meaningful highs early in the experience.
What we needed was a prototype that would test our assumptions. We mapped the revised user flow and translated it into mid-fidelity wireframes. This allowed us to challenge our thinking, validate our ideas, and begin shaping a better experience based on real user input.

The wireframes were developed using a foundational design system I designed within our shared Figma file. 

As the website had no existing style guide, this system became the basis for both the brand identity and the web design handed over to development. I created a centralised component library to serve as a single source of truth - ensuring consistency across design elements and making collaboration more efficient. 
Given the product was intended to be white-labelled for various clients, it was especially important that primary and secondary colours were applied consistently across all components to maintain visual coherence and flexibility for future adaptations.

To make the most of our time and budget, we aimed to uncover meaningful insights that would shape a more intuitive and trustworthy onboarding experience.

We conducted moderated usability testing, preceded by a contextual user interview. This approach allowed us to explore both motivational and behavioural questions while immersing users in the journey we were designing. 
Beyond evaluating our onboarding flow, we also needed to address a more fundamental challenge: the concept of Doing Good Rewards itself. Previous pilot testing showed that users struggled to understand the platform’s value proposition. Our sessions were designed to gauge clarity of the concept and determine how we could better build user trust, particularly when asking users to provide personal and payment details.

Research Goals

To guide our testing, we defined the following research goals:

  • Understand how clearly users grasp the DGR concept

  • Validate the revised onboarding flow for the DGR platform

  • Identify areas of friction or confusion during the checkout experience

  • Uncover usability issues in the proposed journey

  • Explore how to improve user confidence and trust during key conversion moments

Sign-up and onboarding

Purchase and payment

Tasks and Activities

Participants were asked to complete a series of realistic tasks using our clickable prototype.

These tasks were designed to mirror a typical user journey - from discovering the platform to completing the sign-up and check-out process. This hands-on exploration allowed us to observe pain points, listen to users' expectations, and gather feedback on both design and messaging.

Outcome

Making the value proposition clear from the outset

The landing page and onboarding content played a critical role in shaping user expectations and understanding of the DGR platform. Our research revealed that users weren’t initially focused on how the platform works - instead, they wanted to know, 'What value does this provide me?'
Users told us that seeing recognisable brand and charity logos would give the platform greater credibility.
In response, we updated the landing page to feature these details upfront. This transparent approach was key in building trust - ensuring that when users like Jane reached the point of entering credit card and personal information, they felt confident and reassured rather than hesitant

Designing a trust-forming onboarding experience

Feedback showed that users valued being able to choose a cause that resonated with them - so we ensured this was the starting point. Each cause featured a clear description of its impact, with the option to explore further. Filtering tabs were added to help users quickly find causes aligned with their personal interests.
Previously, adding card details created significant friction, with users hesitant to submit their details due to a lack of clarity. To build trust, we introduced a transparent explanation of how the savings and donation mechanisms worked, placed before the payment step. By leading with emotional relevance and adding clarity earlier in the journey, we helped reduce uncertainty and foster confidence in the platform.

Creating a meaningful path from browsing to checkout

In addition to the web platform, the mobile app was a key touchpoint - serving as the primary interface where users browse offers, redeem purchases, and track their impact.
User feedback revealed that people were motivated by knowing the difference they were making, so we embedded small, meaningful moments of impact throughout the app experience - especially during the search and checkout flows.
The payment stage had previously caused confusion, with users unclear about how savings, donations, and total costs were calculated. To address this, we introduced clearer explanations leading up to payment, helping users feel more informed and confident as they completed their purchase.

Learnings

This project reaffirmed the importance of staying human-centred. While quantitative data helped us map the current experience and quickly identify areas of concern, it was our conversations with users that uncovered the emotional drivers, moments of hesitation, and the opportunities to build trust. 
I also gained valuable experience collaborating with developers across both web and app platforms. There were times when we had to balance user needs with business or technical constraints - like the requirement to include onboarding before users could access the platform. Although this ran counter to what users said they preferred, this pushed the UX team to design an onboarding experience that felt genuinely meaningful. In the end, it paid off, helping reduce the bounce rate significantly.

  • Chanelle Nasser

    UX/UI Designer

  • Laura Hobson

    UX/UI Designer

  • Melissa Lau

    UX/UI Designer