Gift cards feature in point of sale app

2021

Overview — As a requested feature for many years, it was vital to release the ability to sell and redeem gift cards for our customer base of small to medium sized business owners. Gift cards generate significant revenue, increase brand loyalty, reduce attrition, and attract new customers. Research shows that people tend to spend more than the value of their gift cards, with 65% of shoppers typically spending 38% more than the card's original amount.

My role—At Zettle I was the design Lead for 5 design teams. In this project: Lead designer

Responsibilities— Led strategy for project, Discovery with current retailers, Structure & run user interviews, Concept development of product and payment structure, UI design (with product designer), Facilitate design sprints.

Collaborators—Cross-functional team of backend, frontend, ios, android devs; product manager, product designer, agile coach.

Gift card as a payment method

The challenge

Gift cards needed to be integrated legally for tax and bookkeeping purposes, yet also to save time for retailers so they could focus on growing their core business. The goal was to create a simple onboarding process and an easy to use workflow that would quickly allow retailers to sell and redeem cards in whichever format they preferred (plastic cards, custom paper, gift card code on receipt, or email). The challenge was to make a general feature that worked for all the different use cases and make it financially viable to purchase this feature as an add-on to their current setup.

Discovery phase

Many retailers had come up with their own workarounds and a large part of the discovery research was to understand these varying implementations and the needs behind them, in order to create a more general feature set that worked for all users.

There were multiple scenarios that needed to be worked through. For example, the ability to tell a customer how much was left on the card, enabling part payments i.e. cash with gift card, returning items paid with gift card, refunding a purchase of a gift card to name a few.

Persona based on user interviews

User research through interviews was key and I conducted several iterations in Sweden and the UK. The main focus was to understand their current workarounds.

In the usability phase, I ran remote and in-person testing with prototype variations on how to set up gift cards. The prototypes were developed with the product designer and wider team.

Final UI for backoffice

Iteration with Design Sprint

I led a design sprint with the development team and company experts

Solution for pricing

I developed the product subscription model after user interviews and argued for it with the product and sales departments. Splitting the feature requirements into a basic set for the freemium model and more advanced features for a premium model. This encouraged smaller retailers, particularly those who were already using a workaround, to set up this feature and become tax compliant. In contrast, more ambitious and larger retailers could purchase the feature including the auto generation of gift card codes for a professional plastic card setup.