Shailen Mistry © 2025
Background
The business wanted to introduce a new proposition for My Waitrose members, however which direction to go was initially undecided.
After a successful design sprint to tackle this problem back in March to a fully rolled out anchor proposition to the My Waitrose scheme in November, Little Treats, really is a project which showcases my skills and growth as a lead product designer.
I was responsible for the iOS, Android and web user experience of this project.
Target customer
Food lovers, which are around 27% of Waitrose shoppers.
Design Sprint Workshop
Problem statement
🤔 As a Waitrose customer, I want a compelling reason to always choose Waitrose rather than splitting my spend across multiple retailers, but I currently don't see any meaningful benefits in prioritising the supermarket. How can we use our loyalty propositions to do this?
To tackle this problem statement it was decided to do a 5 day design sprint, to test and learn as quickly and to give steer to the direction the proposition should take for customers. Participants included individuals from product and service design, user research, product, tech, delivery and proposition. My role was both facilitator and designer.
Testing learnings
- Thresholds to reward spending is recognisable and easy to understand.
- Communication of the unlockable reward needs to be clearer.
- Participants may be open to changing their shopping to get rewarded, if it felt worthwhile and part of their usual shop.
- It was not always clear how much the customer needed to spend in total to unlock the rewards.
- Rewards in general need to feel relevant to the customers shopping behaviour and spending.
- Recipes tested well with those that enjoy food.
- Proximity to a store (and what is stocked) is a big factor in likelihood to shop.
Further Discovery
After a successful design sprint, it was decided to go down the spend threshold route. A discovery core team was set up after the design sprint to understand:
- Further design exploration
- Understand customer sentiment and understanding through more user testing
- Tech feasibility and capabilities
- Business viability
- Further defining the proposition
- The customer journeys
- Delivery timeframes
- Operational logistics
Pilot
Screens
User Journey
I visualised the journey so that it was clear to stakeholders the online journey and the offline journey. It highlighted how there is a difference to when the spend tracker gets updated depending on if the customer has shopped in store or ordered online, this difference is because of a backend behavior.
Refining the experience
There was time in between pilots and full rollout for me to make optimisations.
- Improving the UI of the spend tracker
- Content and copy to fit more into the My Waitrose branding
- Further user testing to validate potential new features
Workshop on defining "Surprise and Delight"
I ran an ideation workshop with other designers and stakeholders to define what the term "surprise and delight" could mean and how it could translate into the My Waitrose experience. After the workshop I began exploring different interaction concepts, using Figma, for the treats reveal screen and bringing in the key thoughts from the workshop session.
Initial Figma Make (AI) concept
I initially took some of the workshop outputs and used them as prompts for Figma Make. This was to experiment with the tool and to give me further inspiration.
Confetti reveal concept
Scratch reveal concept
Slide to reveal concept
Accessibility and inclusion
I had annotated the web and app designs and collaborated with the engineers to build an accessible experience. This included voice overs, tabbing and reading orders of the page or screen.
For My Waitrose members who had no digital presence at all, the team worked on a till receipt solution so that this group of customers can scan their physical loyalty card and also benefit from Little Treats.
Full Rollout
Treats reveal screen with animations and confetti
Impact, learnings and next steps
The October pilot saw a 30% redemption rate of the treats that had been issued. That was up 7% from the September pilot.
From the survey findings:
- Customers who received the treats said they felt appreciated and valued.
- Some were pleased with the items they received, such as roses and pizza, viewing them as well-chosen surprises.
- Positive feedback came from customers appreciating the chance to try new products not typically purchased.
However, we have introduced a new free item voucher which did confuse some customers on how to redeem this item as they still needed to add the item to their trolley. The journeys across the online experience also need some optimisations to reduce any confusion around redeeming a Little Treat or a voucher in general.
For me personally, I was leading on all designs and managed expectations on what would be delivered over the pilots versus full rollout. I learned to adjust design reviews away from Figma and into other mediums so my stakeholders felt comfortable and at ease when reviewing work but also around educating on what works best in a digital space.
Shailen Mistry © 2025
