pub+: Boosting cusotmer loyalty with activated offers

The impact

Within the first campaign, app visits per day rose 31.2% and units sold per day (e.g., beverages sold in pub venues) were up 48%.

Pub+ Awards pub+been honored with several awards, in its first year of launch recognising our commitment to innovation and customer experience:

• Asia Pacific Loyalty Awards:

  • Winner - Best Overall Loyalty Program - Business to Employee

  • Finalist - Best Use of Digital Technology

  • Finalist - Best Loyalty Program Launch

  • Finalist - Best Customer Experience ("Spin the Stakes")

• International Loyalty Awards:

  • Finalist - International Loyalty Awards

• Ashton Media CX Awards:
  Finalist - Best Use of Technology to Revolutionize CX

Project Overview

Client: pub+, ALH Group
Industry: Loyalty Program, Hospitality
Timeline: 3 months (2024)
My Role: Lead Product Designer

Background

pub+ is a new loyalty program launched in May 2024 across 350ALH pubs nationwide.
It rewards members for purchases and enhances engagement through in-app digital interactions and gamification, offering features like table ordering, deals, and rewards. The primary goal of the program is to drive customer loyalty and engagement within ALH venues.

Since the launch, we saw steady increase in daily app downloads and member visits. However, the users weren’t engaging with our loyalty program - the rewards felt generic, the value unclear, and interactions passive. From a business perspective, we lacked the tools to drive urgency or promote specific products, and our current offer model provided little control once live.

We needed a way to create more meaningful engagement while giving the business and suppliers better levers to engage customers.

The opportunity

We introduced a new offer type: Activated offers, which let customers activate an offer before shopping, unlocking exclusive rewards like bonus points, discounts, or free products — all funded by suppliers. This approach allowed:

• More compelling, limited-time offers

• Targeted reward control

• A new lever for supplier collaboration and campaign flexibility

Given that members already have access to the existing 'open' deals (available for everyone, passive offers), the design challenge was to:

HMW invite & nudge members to engage with supplier-funded offers?

HMW communicate the differences between "supplier-funded" vs "open" deals?

Brainstorming as a team

a) Visualising ideas & patterns

User flow was mapped out to drive clarity & established shared understanding across a fast-evolving scope.

Ideation workshops also took place among cross-functional teams to explore mechanics, UI patterns, and error handling scenarios. These sessions helped spark better tech questions and unlock more robust design paths.Ideas were then translated to high-level mockup as per user flow to assess the end-to-end journey.

Design options were evaluated against the following considerations:

• scalability

• MVP vs north star

• tech effort vs time

b) Future proofing IA: moving fast & slow

Apart from design interaction on the activated offers, we quickly recognised that the app's information architecture will be another key UX item to address.

The activated offers are only the step 1 of the roadmap roadmap. More features and offerings are in motion to enrich the app value proposition & build up the loyalty program. As such, we saw the need to re-assess IA to ensure that it will continue to support the ever expanding features of the app.

Working closely with other designers who focus on other new features, we brainstormed a number of concepts that sits across the spectrum of MVP vs North star.

This exercise creates alignment amongst the Product team and plants a seed for incorporating IA work for the future roadmap.

Decision & stakeholder alignment

Against a plethora of ideas, we invited developers to assess these concepts and estimate the dev effort on the concepts. Their input prove critical to the priorirtisation exercise so that we could work with the tangible.

In addition, we also form a tight feedback loop with the business on our concepts. Give this is a new feature, their go-to market plan will inform the scale and depth of the potential features.

For instance, we learnt that the 1st campaign will only be launched in Queensland with 1 simple 'spend-and-get" activated offer for each transaction. This is very different from a national-wide campaign with 20 activated offers that have different redemption mechanisms. This input alone help us cut ideas ruthlessly and prioritise with confidence.

Before progressing to UI production, we earmarked a UX playback with all business stakeholders as a key project milestone. The objective of this playback is to obtain:

1. Group alignment on the experience 

2. Business sign-off on UX 

But more importantly, the session was also to highlight the design feature what we can realistically ship by the deadline and clearly communicate the thinking and next steps behind the descoped features.

Final design