Initially, customers could only redeem their points for rewards within our rewards catalog. In May 2023, I championed a redemption experience at Ness that allowed customers to erase any healthy transaction with points. This assumption was that this would make points even more valuable to customers and thus drive further spending on the Ness Card. I left Ness before launching this feature, but I prepared a business case and worked with our Design team to create all relevant screens.
Read more below to learn about the context, opportunities, and solution. Plus, see the final designs.
Context
Ness’ growth loop looked a bit like this:
- The customer spends on the Ness Card and earns 5x points on the transaction.
- Customer reviews Rewards Marketplace and redeems for reward (e.g. Sees value).
- Customer is incentivized to spend more on their Ness card.
In short, points were the carrot that incentivized further engagement with the card. However, the points were only valuable if you could find ways to redeem them.
At Ness, we had already established a curated rewards marketplace of 60+ brands. However, it was difficult for our Rewards marketplace to be comprehensive enough. There was no way for our Partnerships team to build relationships with every health and wellness brand on the market.
This presented a real challenge. Ness points had to feel valuable to customers. Otherwise, they were going to shift spending elsewhere. But, we couldn’t offer every brand under the sun.
Opportunities
When I spoke with customers, I’d frequently get requests for brands in their local area, brands with such a small footprint we’d be unlikely to add them to our rewards catalog. Similarly, customers would ask for big-time brands we had no plans of adding or Trader Joe’s/Whole Foods that didn’t fit within our existing Rewards Marketplace structure. Clearly, we needed another way for customers to use their points at Ness.
We discussed two main opportunities:
- Point Transfer. In the same way that Chase lets you transfer points to United Airlines, you could transfer your Ness points to Thrive Market or Classpass (example only).
- Pay with points. Like other cards, you could redeem your points as a credit towards your balance.
Internally, the momentum was swinging towards building a transfer relationship. With a transfer relationship, we could co-market the card through brand partners and negotiate a discount on point value, helping our bottom line. By contrast, pay with points offered no ability to negotiate. We’d effectively be locking in points at a specific dollar amount.
Solution
I ultimately drove the decision to launch pay with points. I had three main reasons I felt this was more effective than point transfer:
- Pay with points was entirely within our control, meaning we could deliver it faster. We didn’t have to rely on partner brands.
- Pay with points gave customers access to unlimited merchants through our rewards program. Customers would be able to use points on any healthy merchant, not just merchants we have in our rewards catalog.
- Pay with points aligned with existing user behavior.
On that last point, I surveyed a group of Ness superusers. Initially, I asked what they would like to do with their Ness points. Everyone ranked “Transfer to another partner” incredibly high on the list. But, when I asked them about their most recent point redemption on another card, virtually everyone used it for cash back. There was a tension between what customers said they wanted and what they actually did. I opted to go with what they actually did.
While building conviction for this concept, I worked cross-functionally to build out a business model that we then used to set the price per point. Once we had the business case solidified and everyone was on board, we were able to build the UI elements. In this case, the UI was rather easy; rallying everyone behind the idea was trickier.
One delightful element of the design: As you selected transactions, we automatically disabled other checkboxes so you couldn’t select more transactions than you had available points. If you tapped a disabled checkbox, we’d let you know why it was disabled.
Design
