Discover

Although Apple Pay has the highest global mobile wallet market share, it still has low adoption at 9.3% and number of sales at 4%.

How can we increase Apple Pay adoptions and transactions? We explore credit cardholder behavior.

87% of credit cardholders have at least one credit card that allows them to earn rewards.

Furthermore, Apple earns a 0.15% transaction commission of each purchase and works with major credit and debit cards worldwide with more added over time, thus increasing Apple Pay adoption and transactions would bring significant return.

As consumers value store loyalty in choosing a digital wallet and certain rewards are specific to stores, I focused on the integration of a rewards program into Apple Wallet.

Based on reward-maximization app reviews and the current economic atmosphere of job insecurity and rising living costs, a provisional persona was created. This was used to build empathy that would help create a more usable product.

Define

Research findings distilled into the following HMW question:

‍How might we help users conveniently and reliably identify which card will give them the best reward for any given purchase when they pay with a credit card?

A competitive analysis among different reward-maximization apps informed the four minimum requirements to include in the minimum value product. Shared by the direct and indirect competitor, the location-based card search was an opportunity to create additional value to drive adoption and engagement for new and existing users.‍

The analysis also revealed a heavy focus on maximizing rewards. However, as Apple's brand is about simplicity, the feature needed to enhance instead of interfere with Apple Pay's main user flow of digital payment. A sitemap was created to find the best locations to integrate this feature within the Apple Pay ecosystem.

Simultaneously with the sitemap, user flows were created to determine additional features that would help users more easily maximize credit card rewards. The features include saving a default card for future use on a specific category of purchase and viewing their rewards summary.

Develop

Rounds of iteration from sketching to hi-fi prototypes was done to deliver the optimal layout and visual aesthetic that would serve the user's needs.

Testing

5 usability tests were conducted to test for discoverability and learnability. All tasks were accomplished, but discoverability and learnability issues remained. Affinity mapping distilled the following insights.

Deliver

Throughout the design process, iterations were implemented to address usability issues. The following changes were prioritized to better integrate the feature into the overall Apple product design style and improve user understanding.