BMO - AIR MILES
New Collector Journey
Project Summary
AIR MILES wanted to create a new experience for new collectors to help ease them into the program. This was a project that focused on exclusive, guided offers as well as program-specific education.
Project Length
5 Months
Role
UX Designer
What is AIR MILES?
Before I talk about what I did at AIR MILES, it is important for you to know what AIR MILES actually is.
AIR MILES is a Loyalty Program where "collectors" earn Miles by completing various offers and redeem them for merchandise, gift cards and more.
Over the years more and more ways to earn and redeem have popped up and the program itself has become a little difficult to navigate, especially for new collectors just joining the program. Hence our problem...
The Solution
Now that we defined our problem we had to come up with a solution. And the solution to the problem was this project: The New Collector Journey.
This experience was to be served to new collectors through emails and the AIR MILES app. A guided experience. With a focus on getting them to download the app for a better experience. The exact journey was to look like this:
Initial Exploration - Emails
For this project I was in charge of helping the creative team (graphic design and copywriting folks) with the layout and design of the various emails in the journey and entry points for the app. Here are some of the initial designs done for the experience. They were rough and merely used to help define a direction for the team to go in.
But as rough as this step in the process was, it was very important. Prior to laying out all of our emails and their modules like this we as a team had a hard time wrapping our heads around what exactly needed to get done. This helped us ask the right questions and solidify our vision for what this project needed to accomplish.
AEM Ready - Websites
With the emails we were able to sort of design whatever we want because of how flexible the platform is for developing the emails. But when it came to the web pages it was a slightly different story.
Just as AIR MILES was going through a rebrand, they were also switching over to using Adobe Experience Manager to publish pages. And my educational pages that I designed for the campaign were going to be among some of the first to be built and published on that platform.
So I took it upon myself to learn how to use AEM so I could better understand its limitations and to make sure that anything I was designing in Figma would actually be doable on the platform. During this stage in the project I was in a constant back and forth with the assigned dev to this project to make sure that the designs I made were being properly represented. Here are some of those designs.
Strategic Pivoting
Things don't always go according to plan, and in situations like those you need to pivot! Where we once wanted to utilize the app's native notifications system to do the heavy lifting for our educational content, that turned out to be something we were unable to do.
On top of that we started to feel like by giving collectors two paths to choose from: Shop in-store or shop on airmilesshops.ca, a much bigger educational focus was needed.
So we added two educational web pages to our journey, one to house all the educational content that was slated for the app notifications, and another to better explain the difference between shopping in-store and online and how exactly to do that.
It's also important to mention that AIR MILES was going through a rebrand as this project was developing, and so we designed with the express purpose of being able to incorporate any new colours, fonts, or shapes that would be coming with said rebrand.
Here are some brainstorming and the final designs for the websites.
Brainstorming
Final Designs
Project Launch
The New Collector Journey launched in July of 2024 and I am waiting to hear how well it is performing. Stay tuned to find out how this new initiative helped new collectors have a great experience with AIR MILES!
Finalizing Designs - Emails
During this project AIR MILES was also going through its initial stages for its rebrand which meant that we needed to be very flexible with our initial designs. But when we got to the stage of creating the hi-fi designs, luckily we were able to get first access to all the new colours, illustrations and lifestyle photography because of how closely we were working interdepartmentally.
Emails were designed by myself and one creative department member. Here are some of the final designs for the email campaign highlighting which email modules I was personally responsible for.
Final Emails
Modules I designed
Here are some of the modules I personally designed. The one explaining the in a nutshell what a collector can do with either Cash or Dream Miles was called "The clearest I've ever seen the AIR MILES Reward Program ever laid out" by multiple stakeholders.
The Problem
It is no secret that the AIR MILES Reward Program is complicated. They've got Cash Miles, Dream Miles, Bonus Miles, Balance Preferences and more. There are always new things being added to the program that collectors need to look out for. And at the end of the day that's just more stuff for brand new collectors to learn.
HOW MIGHT WE
Simplify the program into a bite-sized experience to get new collectors
earning and redeeming with as little friction as possible?