Brim Financial: eShop
Design an e-commerce feature that would expand off the current Brim Marketplace & bring exclusive online offers right in the hands of all Brim cardmembers.
Market Research, User Flows, Information Architecture, Sketching, Wireframing, High Fidelity Designs (mobile apps + desktop)
Brim Financial
2019
The Client
Brim Financial, a Canadian fintech credit card issuer, uses its fully integrated digital platform to cater to customers daily professional and personal needs. One of the many great benefits Brim offers its members is the ability to access the Brim Marketplace. A section within the application dedicated to rewarding users for daily purchases using their Brim card.
A look at our competitors
Attempting to embed an e-commerce platform into our existing Brim Marketplace required a lot of thought and research to determine the best approach. As we already had the basic structure of our Marketplace to keep in mind, we needed to find a way to keep a similar layout that would allow for users to browse exclusive online deals through their Brim portal or app.
We wanted to really understand how other e-commerce and cashback sites were functioning in order to help inform our design decisions. We looked at Rakuten, Shopper Army, eBay & Amazon.
We quickly discovered that both Rakuten & Shopper Army were very similar to what we were looking to achieve. Both websites clearly displayed their offers with big brand logos and clearly identified the cash back percentage which made it easy to navigate. All offers had a clear CTA to “Shop Now”. This unique URL would activate the offer and users would have a certain time period to complete their order without navigating away or closing the window – otherwise the offer would be void. Both sites offered cashback in different ways: Cheque, Paypal, Transfer to a Charity/Organization/Family Member or Amazon giftcards.
eBay and Amazon brought some great insight into how we could use filtering and organization of offers. As this new addition required a redesign to Brim Marketplace to accommodate over 40+ new brands we knew that we would have to work on how users would be able to quickly find offers based on their interests. Both sites use category filters and sorting in such a functional way that it makes finding what you’re looking for seem like an easy task, given their massive catalogue of items.
Sketching & Prototyping
We began our initial sketching on paper & then moved into medium-fidelity mockups. We used our current Marketplace designs as a jumping off point. As eShop was becoming a new part of the Marketplace family, we knew we couldn’t stray too far away from what we already had. We played with how to go about designing the eShop tiles first and then moved into sketching the offer listing page where user’s could activate the offer by pressing the “Shop Now” button. Once we had the main structure we moved onto designing all of our filtering and sorting options.
High-Fidelity Designs
From many rounds of mockups and user testing, we quickly learned that having a FAQ was vital as many users were confused about how eShop offers worked. We needed to be very clear about how users could go about accessing eShop offers as well as laying out any specific restrictions in the offer details popup modal.
We also performed some user testing on the verbiage we were using for displaying the offer earn rate. In our current Marketplace we were using “X points per $1 spent” which many users seemed to not fully understand. Looking at Rakuten and Shopper Army as a reference, they both used “X% cash back”. We decided to test these 2 different options, and there was an overwhelming 90% of user who better understood the percentage model. This discovery completely changed how we communicated our offers across all platforms!
