Improving Customer Experience and the Bottom Line

Out with the Old

The Challenge

The idea was to make in-store and online registration a breeze. To do so, we needed to build a digital application that helps shoppers type less. The app needed to pre-populate as much of the application form as possible using only a few pieces of data. One example is for a customer could simply scan their driver’s license with the phone’s camera and most of the application would complete itself.

The challenge…

Design a visually appealing interface that could easily be white-labeled for each new brand.

Structure a codebase flexible enough to support multiple data-collection workflows and brand-specific customizations.

Support heavy traffic from several high profile brands.

Meet aggressive development deadlines.

Spotting Obstacles

Too Many Keystrokes are Daunting

In conducting early research, we realized that every keystroke brings users one step closer to abandonment. Long rows of inputs and legalese tend to be demoralizing to even the most determined of shoppers.

Powerful Technology can be Slow

Sure, we could implement the technology to save consumers a lot of keystrokes. Unfortunately, it could also be extremely slow to run. For example, extracting and formatting meaningful data from the photo of an ID can take as much as 10 seconds to complete. Wait times like these are almost as daunting as too many keystrokes.

Allowing Various Workflows is Hard

The beauty of this app is giving the users the power to choose the data collection workflow they want. However, each data-collection strategy requires a unique workflow with unique edge cases. In spite of this, we’d need to be able to seamlessly add and support any data-collection workflow into the app.

Avoiding Obstacles

With these issues in mind, we started sketching out possible user flows. After multiple user interviews and several iterations of sketches, we landed on an option that would eliminate slow loading times, minimize user keystrokes, and allow us to swap any data-collection strategy in or out with ease.

With these workflows finalized and approved, we were able to move confidently along with the rest of the design and development work.

Reacting with Rails

We knew we had to choose technologies that would allow us to strike a balance between building quickly to meet deadlines and providing the smoothest, snappiest user experience possible.

Rails allowed us to build out an API quickly and focus the bulk of our effort on the client-facing experience.

React with Redux provided a strong technical foundation for the user interface that we can continue to build upon, regardless of what technology is ultimately used on the API side.

In With the New

We launched for a single brand with incredible results. We reduced the application abandonment rate by 87%. Success!

The app landed our client 30 new accounts in one store in one day while significantly reducing the time to apply.

Since then, we’ve matured the platform. We implemented new data collection strategies and have signed up numerous new brands.