When I joined the Shuffle team in 2023, the company was just a couple of months old and I was the first product/design recruit into the team. That left me with an audaciously large goal, I had to help steer the business to not only launch it’s first product, but find a foothold in the competitive market it had placed itself in.
For some background - Shuffle was founded by two people, Ollie and Enzo, who met whilst building Loot and later Bo (Ollie was a founder of Loot). They decided to build Shuffle around a year earlier and had worked through a variety of scenarios first to see what they believed would make most sense for the business, the consensus was to build a restaurant rewards card, one with a randomised reward, that enticed the customers in using a variety of gaming dynamics and was funded by loans (that are normally very hard to come by) to restaurants and coffee shops.
Shuffle have a big goal, to become the number one rewards app in the UK, competing with the likes of Airtime Rewards, Quidco and TopCashback, by applying the app first principles that have seen so much success in companies like Monzo to the world of rewards.
Back to the story, my first task at Shuffle was to build out a quick brand and a “V0” of the product that we could present together to investors that would give them a vision of what the team had envisaged and allow the company to secure their first “proper” round of funding.
So over the course of the first 2 weeks of my time at Shuffle I produced just that, a simple few screen prototype and an initial brand that we could use for presentations, and printed material but most importantly this initial work to show investors.
I designed and led the branding evolution as we worked out what Shuffle was and who it served. We had to conduct this in stages, as I mentioned earlier, our initial brand was designed quickly, based on a variety of assumptions we made as a team, the second and current brand at Shuffle is different to that. Whilst it shares some of the same tropes, this brand was based on research and an identity we worked together to figure out as a team.
By this time, we’d broken down the hospitality market in the UK into a city by city cohort, and calculated that Manchester would offer us the best chance of success. Manchester has a tight city centre (this would allow us to get to market saturation in the wider market more easily), it has a young population (more-than 40% are 20-40 year olds), and it’s got a burgeoning restaurant scene (Rudy’s, Mowglis and Bundobust just to name a few).
Utilising frameworks like the 5 whys, we were able to establish why Shuffle exists, who our target audience would be and what they would come to Shuffle to do. This helped me to conclude that the brand for Shuffle should be relatively transparent, hidden to some extent as we should be a facilitator to both our brands and our customers. Enabling our customers to have a great night out (and be rewarded for doing so) and allowing our brands to reach more people and grow their business through incredibly hard to access funding.
Shuffle’s brand exists in the subtle details (like our motion design work we built with Luke Brown) our utilitarian choice of typeface with Onest, a limited but varied colour palette and a stance where we use photography from our retail partners to highlight them rather than ourselves and show our users what they can have access to for any of our printed or online advertising material.
The team were on a tight deadline, we wanted to go live by the end of the year (it was now February) the team still had to gather a number of approvals and we were also being held “hostage” by the Mastercard card issuing process. This, was where I had an idea. What if we were to offer customers a rewards product, that had the same app experience, one with random rewards, with a curated list of spots, but linked to your existing bank card.
(On reflection, this was probably very inspired with Tom’s story at Monzo, and how they launched with a pre-paid debit card in order to fast track their own success story)
We ran this idea through a couple of internal workshops, looking at the competitors in this space (Cheddar offer a similar concept) and built a quick prototype to show to prospective customers about how this would work.
It was a success, the customers loved it, and importantly it meant we could go live earlier, in fact much earlier (Shuffle went live five months early in August 2024).
The app design took place in three parts, discovery, onboarding and rewards. Onboarding was how we’d build trust with customers and get them onto Shuffle. Discovery was how we’d showcase customers the spaces on offer and how they use the app. How much they’d saved and any other rewards were saved for the rewards section.
Onboarding can be one of the most important parts to an apps initial design. Whilst forms are kind of a said and done thing, designing one that instills trust in your user and allows them to also understand why they should keep progressing with the journey is something we tried to nail at Shuffle. As part of the app’s onboarding journey we had to fulfil a few legal requirements, full name, date of birth and two-factor authentication are all essential to a cashback based rewards product.
To nail this journey I decided to include a couple of re-engagement screens as part of our onboarding flow. The first set were there to introduce a customer to the app when they had just signed up (through Apple) for their Shuffle account, the second were just after they had completed their app onboarding journey (which you could skip out of at anytime). These allowed us to re-highlight to the user what great rewards awaited them and boosted our conversion rate by around 15%.
The main core of the Shuffle app are obviously the rewards. These are given to customers in the form of a random discount at any of their qualifying retailers, and returned to the customers as cash back into their connected bank account.
To show these rewards to the customers we kept a reasonably familiar interface, utilising similar aspects to your everyday banking app whilst injecting some personality from our retailers (their logos and photos in the specific transaction screens) we showcased the cashback the users had earnt per transaction and as an overall total.
Discovering where to go out was one of the larger pain-points of our users. As all city-dwellers (and casual Netflix viewers) will know, our abundance of choice in today’s world makes it harder to make a decision and that’s where we wanted to step in. As we were curating a list of retailers specifically to work with at Shuffle, we could highlight those per a users individual requirements, be that, where was closest or what suited the cuisine they were after that day. To do this we created both a list view and a map view that allowed our users to simply switch between views and head to whatever location they desired.
As Shuffle also work with a few local chains, we needed to design up a screen that was adaptable and flexible enough to work with multiple locations across the city. This is where the idea for our flexible “carousel” container came in. On the map page, you would be able to see each retailer individually, whereas on the retailer page, you’d be able to see each location specifically. By using an existing component, the carousel we’d built for showcasing menu items (another key deciding factor to our users), we were able to adapt this to show multiple locations for those brands that required it.
As all good designers know, a solid design system not only makes our work easier, but it also allows us to more easily communicate with product and development teams as we build out screen designs. At Shuffle I established a design system almost from the get-go (you can see some of that above) and worked on it iteratively, building out components as and when we needed them.
The final piece of the puzzle was to build out and document the final design system. The documentation was designed to build continuity after I left and allow the two new designers to continue to build out screens in the same style and manner that I had set up. I put the guidelines together for both developer and designer use, ensuring that there was a single source of truth for any new component, therefore I included all component instances and states (linked to the design file), rules on the do’s and don’ts of using each component in system and when appropriate, motion guidelines.
Shuffle launched to the public on 13th September 2024, two months after we launched with a group of private beta testers. We took the app live with 14 partner venues across Manchester, from the best coffee spots (in Pollen and Fort) to the brightest food upstarts (Bundobust, Medlock Canteen and Madre). The launch was a huge success and was done in partnership with the largest food group network “Eat Manchester” in Manchester, seeing over 1000 sign ups in our first week! Not only did Shuffle have a successful launch, the app also had great retention. With features like the random rewards, boosted cash back, enhanced discovery and streaks pulling people back into the app, the average user clocked in at ~1.5 visits per month in the first two months after launch, beating the companies own expectations by ~200%!
My work with Shuffle focused on taking them from zero to one, and I've left them just there. Geared up for a successful introduction to the wider public, with a market-ready product, a strong brand identity, and a growing network of restaurant partners.
