About

leal is an application made to make loyalty programs and rewards systems easy and accessible for small and medium businesses. In order to achieve that, the app will track the users by their phone numbers and allow businesses to reward their regular customers in a variety of ways. The application also features a robust cloud-based admin dashboard that will collect customers’ data and display it to business owners.

The team working on the project consisted of 5 people, 3 developers and 2 designers. We had to wear multiple hats during the project. In addition to being the UX Design Lead, I also had the opportunity to work on the product UI, Social Media assets and Printed assets.

Leal means Loyal

The concept of leal was inspired by already existing technology of guest engagement in Brazilian and Ukrainian restaurants. These businesses have their own apps that incentivize their guests to return and simultaneously gather impactful data about them. We wanted to create a similar technology for small businesses, such as grocery stores, barbershops or yoga studios. We aim to replace traditional loyalty programs such as punch cards and coupons. One of the biggest project challenges is to make the app a white-label so that different small businesses can adopt this loyalty program.

Project Requirements

leal has a few very specific tasks and constraints. There was a very strict deadline of 12 weeks and the tasks had to be completed in weekly sprints. The goal of the project was to develop a concept from an idea phase to a functioning minimal viable prototype.

As the finalle of our education at Langara, Capstone had to solve a real-world problem. Moreover, it had to utilize all of the technologies we learned in the program. It had to include a Web app, a native app for both iOS and Android and the product had to utilize cloud technology in some way. The Release date was scheduled for 4th of December 2018, where we had to present the project to the panel of industry specialists.

Project Features

Even before the deep dive into competitors’ research, we understood that there are multiple ways of solving this problem already. In order to make an interesting product, we decided to focus on lowering the participation barriers for the customers and provide useful and relevant marketing information for the businesses.

One of the insights we got from the research was the need for flexibility in the rewards system. The businesses we observed had different business models, and each required their own approach to their customers. Hence, we provide the business owner with a choice of reward for each individual loyalty program.

The second major insight we gained was about the immediacy of the process. People don’t want to waste time when they are in a queue. Any new process we introduce into an already working system must be integrated and fast. To ensure that, we developed a native tablet app.