Background

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Survey Junkie is a mobile and desktop app that delivers market research surveys for users to take and get paid for sharing their opinions. In 2021, the newly formed Consumer Design team embarked on a 1.5 year design and development project to completely transform Survey Junkie from a dated monolithic application to a design-system-based SPA, native Android, and iOS app. I had design ownership over the Rewards section of Survey Junkie.

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The redemption page in Survey Junkie prior to redesign, an uninspired and transactional experience.

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Project Goals

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Make rewards a top-level feature

In the legacy Survey Junkie site (affectionately called "the Monolith"), our Members could only view rewards once they hit 500 points, hidden behind an ephemeral "redeem now" button. The single biggest point of user value in the app, rewards, was not in any way visible until very late in the user journey. We aimed to make rewards front and center of the Member's experience to reinforce the main value proposition of the Survey Junkie platform.

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Streamline the redemption experience

Redemption in the Monolith was a very clunky experience. Gift cards options were needlessly hidden behind 2-factor authentication, our bank transfer feature was very vague as you handed over all your sensitive bank account information, and our gift card workflow took you completely out of our product to a third-party site. Our Member Support team also responded to many daily support tickets where Members can to a complete stop in the app due to unclear error states, lack of status updates and reward tracking. We aimed to redemption as straight-forward and easy as possible, and keep Member's in-app in order to more closely tie tangible rewards back to the SJ brand, and cut down on Member Support redemption tickets.
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Make the delightful experience actually delightful

Getting rewarded for all your time and effort should be a natural point of celebration and excitement within a product. Unfortunately, in the legacy Monolith this experience was about as transactional as you could get. We aimed to bring the delight to rewards through the use of color, microcopy, and animation.

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Process

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1. Audit & analyze

I used Figjam to workflow the end-to-end redemption experience. This was particularly helpful to communicate with Stakeholders to illustrate the friction that Members experienced when completing a seemingly simple task. This also helped illuminate how often the Member had to dip in and out of Survey Junkie, email, and our external vendor's website just to redeem. All of these moments diluted the Survey Junkie brand and created a confusing experience.

A portion of the workflow audit visualizing the (up to) 24-step redemption process in the Monolith workflow

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I also talked with our Member Support team to understand the top support issues that Members were reaching out to support to remedy. The Member Support team was handling hundreds of tickets per week due to the unclear and confusing redemption experience in the Monolith.

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2. Design & refine

Using our new design system, I created a streamlined redemption experience for each reward type for SPA (mobile, tablet, and desktop) and native iOS and Android keeping the aforementioned goals front of mind. We went through many iterations of the points visualization and rewards page until we felt the design was elegant, concise, and delightful.

Design evolution of the rewards page and points visualization in Android

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3. Test & refine

We tested existing Survey Junkie members and performed first-time and second-time unmoderated usability tests for the redemption experience to understand where Members continuously got tripped up after familiarizing with the new workflow and refined the designs further. We are currently A/B testing this experience in production against the legacy version to get a real apples-to-apples comparison of engagement and retention.

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Current and Future State

This project was extremely comprehensive and far more work went into it than I could summarize here concisely. As a new Product Design team, we were simultaneously establishing and evolving our brand and design system and creating this platforming work from the ground up; it was no small task!
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This project is still in process, check back for updates!
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The final Survey Junkie mobile and desktop app, a changing background animation to indicate your progress towards cash out, and a celebratory moment once you get to 500 points.