SPC, Chrome Extension
Problem
Our customers often forget to use the app or our website when shopping online. This is an issue for both the company and the users because it prevents us from earning commissions on sales, and they end up missing out on exclusive discounts.
How might we help our users always get the best deals without making them check our app?
Solution
A Chrome extension was developed to remind users to activate the discounts they're entitled to when shopping with their favourite brands online. With this easy-to-use tool, users can enjoy the full benefits of their SPC membership and save money on their online purchases.
Results
The Chrome extension has been a success, with over 2000 downloads and a significant increase in commission revenue. It has helped many users save big on their online purchases while streamlining the process of activating their discounts.
01
Understand & Research
We discovered this problem while conducting user interviews for a different solution. More than one user told us that they often forget to use their SPC membership when shopping, which means that they were basically paying $10/year for nothing. Obviously, we needed to dig deeper into it since not only it was an issue for our users (who were missing out on lots of discounts), but also for us, because it meant that we weren’t getting the commissions from our partners for those sales.
After conducting further research on this we uncovered the following:
More users validated the existence of the problem, confirming that they forget to use SPC almost half of the times they shop (both in-store and online) on average.
Every person we interviewed said they use Google Chrome as their main browser
50% of our users mentioned that they often tend to shop on their laptops rather than their phones.
02
Ideation
After analyzing the insights coming from the research phase, I started working on initial wireframes to share with the team, in order to align on the direction that we wanted to take this product towards.
First of all, though, I had to figure out how to even set up my canvas in order to start building a Chrome extension. Usually, design software such as Adobe XD, Figma, and Sketch provide starting points for different platforms (e.g, iPhones, Macbooks, etc.) but there was nothing available for a browser extension. This led me to conduct some competitive analysis to understand how other companies have built their extensions, in terms of window size, fonts, etc.
Scope of Work
The scope of the project was to provide our users with a Chrome Extension that would make it easier for them to redeem their discounts when shopping online. The product would also serve as a discovery tool for user to find out new brands that are partnered with SPC
The product had to meet the following requirements:
Easy and intuitive to use
Provide different icon states depending on the status of the discount on a website (default, available, redeemed)
Must sync with the user’s SPC account
Must provide clearly communicate if there are different types of discounts available (online vs in-store)
03
Prototyping & Testing
After completing the initial prototype we put it in front of our users to gather additional feedback.
Some of the things we wanted to validate included:
What should unavailable offers look like?
Should in-store and online offers be separated?
Does the flow of information make sense?
Do users intuitively know what steps to take to redeem an offer?
04
Development
After analyzing users' feedback we decided to make some tweaks to the prototype and once we were confident of being in a good place we exported the designs to Zeplin, so that the DevOps team could start working on it.
At that point, my role was mostly to provide support to developers while also making sure that the final product was being built exactly like the prototype.
If you'd like to try the extension out for yourself here's the link to install it:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/spc-student-deals/lbmedplpeggindlnaomcjahdlpmalcpm
I understand that you might have some questions after reading this case study as some details have been omitted for the sake of readability. If you’d like to learn more about the project please feel free to get in touch!