SSW Rewards is a social mobile application that connects internal staff and external attendees across SSW’s six offices and event programme. The app was rebuilt to move users from passive account holders to active participants, turning event attendance into a repeatable loop of scanning, earning and redeeming.
Lead Product Designer across research, UX, UI and developer handoff.
The original app treated rewards as a standalone feature disconnected from the events where they were earned. Restructuring the experience around the event moment gave users a clear reason to open the app while they were in the room, lifting active session numbers by 48%.
New attendees were dropping out before earning a single point. Improving the User feedback and rewards structure helped excite and engage users right from the first interaction, improving engagement and advocacy.
The previous model asked users to track points that had no clear value and no obvious way to spend them. We introduced Coins as a single earned currency with a visible balance, a fixed earn rate and a redemption catalogue, so users could see what an action was worth and what it bought before they committed to it. The same currency model, components and terminology were carried across the user app and the admin console, giving the internal team one system to manage rather than two.
SSW Rewards already existed, but it was not earning its place on anyone’s home screen. Staff used it inconsistently. External attendees downloaded it at an event, earned nothing, and never returned.
The issues were structural rather than cosmetic. The reward mechanic was buried, the connection between attending an event and earning something was unclear, and the profile carried little social value. On top of that, the interface had drifted over successive releases into an inconsistent set of patterns.
The brief asked for a facelift. The real opportunity was to rebuild the journey around the few moments that mattered: arriving at an event, scanning, earning and being seen.
Before proposing solutions I audited the existing app screen by screen, mapping every path a user could take from install to redemption.
HotJar behaviour data and Google Forms surveys were used alongside the audit to find where users stalled and what they expected to get out of the app. I ran workshops and iterative design reviews with product owners, solution architects and the extended design team to pressure test the findings.
The audit exposed duplicated functionality, inconsistent navigation, dead-end screens and a reward loop that broke at the exact point users needed the most encouragement.
Rather than redesigning screens in isolation, the experience was restructured around four core journeys: Attend, Earn, Redeem and Share.
Related actions that previously sat several taps apart were pulled into single continuous flows. Scanning moved to the centre of the experience. Profile and leaderboard were reframed as social payoff rather than settings, giving users a reason to return between events.
The result was a task-oriented app that matched how people behave at an event rather than how the original software had been assembled.
With the journeys defined, the interface was rebuilt on a consistent component library.
Navigation, terminology and shared interactions were standardised so the app behaved predictably wherever a user entered it. The admin console was brought into the same system, giving the internal team a familiar experience and setting up a larger admin overhaul without further rework.
Specifications and documentation were prepared in Confluence, with Jira and GIT supporting handoff and QA alongside the development team.
Low-fidelity wireframes were used to move quickly through layout options, test information hierarchy and settle the placement of the scan action before any visual design started.
High-fidelity designs and an interactive Figma prototype followed, which allowed usability sessions to surface friction points early and kept refinement cycles short.
SSW Rewards moved from a feature-led app to an event-led one.
Auditing the existing product, restructuring the journeys and standardising the system removed the friction that had been stopping users at their first interaction, while creating a foundation the internal team can extend.
Feedback from staff and event attendees points to a clearer purpose, faster first use and a stronger reason to open the app during an event rather than after it.
Joseph Fernandez