The Home Depot wants to introduce a loyalty program to their pro customer base. Pro customers who have the app downloaded spend an average of $2,000 more per year than pros who do not. As of 2019, only 460k of their 2.5 million active pro customers use the app. There is a huge opportunity to increase engagement and grab an even larger section of the pro customer base, with a potential $100 million opportunity each year.

So how do we make an app they want to use? Pro customers are attracted to products that make their job easier. The quicker they can access information they need, the happier they are. They responded positively to points and progress trackers towards free rewards. How can we fill this need?

From user interviews and previously collected data, we identified these main needs for pro customers:

-Easy access to the search bar, recent purchases, and store location

-Deals and promotions for brands and items relevant to their company

-Trade specific experience (ex: plumber, electrician, etc.)

We reviewed over 30 loyalty apps in the food, retail, and entertainment industries and assessed what loyalty programs are providing the best customer experiences. The criteria used to establish if a loyalty program is successful is:

-Minimum of a 4.9/5 star rating in the Apple app store
-Must use a minimum of 4 of the following gamification techniques:
   -Avatars
   -Points
   -Progress graphs
   -Bonus challenges
   -Rewards
   -Leaderboards
-Ranked #15 or higher in respective industry

Based on our established criteria, the top loyalty rewards programs belong to Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, Chipotle, and Best Buy. We used these 4 as the baseline for this study.

Once these were selected, we reskinned the designs as if they were Home Depot apps for testing. This is an easy way to test user opinions without the bias of different companies, and it was a fun design exercise to try out with the team.

We used a single elimination tournament for this user test. Users were presented two designs and asked to evaluate which one they found to be more informative, more visually appealing, and which they would rather use. The design with the most positive responses would advance to a final round.

This is not a traditional way of user testing, but we thought it would be a fun way of portraying our data since we conducted this test around March Madness.​​​​​​​

The Home Depot should consider including the following in a Pro loyalty program:

   -Progress trackers with clear milestones
   -Short term and long term goals
   -Requirement to gain next reward
   -Display what rewards can be earned
   -Offer a variety of rewards
   -Give bonus ways to earn points
   -Discounts, $ or %
   -Forgot to scan option
   -Receipt lookup
   -Easy access at checkout
   -Personalized greetings