Quidco UX & Design (2010-2015)
Quidco is the UK's number one cashback loyalty platform
Visit QuidcoI first began working for Quidco from the Winnipeg dev office of Tipping Canoe, visiting London several times as the team there began to grow. UX research consultant Leisa Reichelt was hired to conduct user interviews in order to understand how Quidco fit in the marketplace. While one of our developers and I weren't a part of the interviews understandably, we spent nearly two weeks workshopping through the results and insights.
The outcome was a better understanding of the product, and how it was preceived by consumers—a document that informed UX decisions for the next two years. Following the consultation, I was invited to join the growing team in London as the product was being fully spun out on its own.
My role
I began as a solo UX designer before we built a full team. The role required that I wore many hats as a product designer, branding designer, and at times an advertising designer. I produced wireframes, full mockups, prototypes, presentations and usability tests, working alongside an amazing team, collaborating with product, development, marketing, and management as the core product evolved and changed. When I begen, the core product was a cashback site, and we quickly grew it into a full featured loyalty platform.
Three phases
My time at Quidco fits into three phases: implementing our initial understanding & evolving the product, rethinking our approach using introduction of design sprints, setting up the product for future success. The first phase was a lean time as I worked as the solo UX designer along side our marketing designer. Some time after, someone in the design community referred to the work as budget—a very true observation to describe not only our limited budget but a fair reflection of the market our product fit in.
When I began, we had some 300,000 members signed up for Quidco brought to the product through word-of-mouth growth and next to no advertising. The product was positioned as a "cashback cooperative", and while this made sense for the initial product being a new movement, this frame of reference brought some baggage in the UK. Members remained vital to our product, however we moved away from the "cooperative" model, and with several advertising campaigns over the next couple of years, the product grew to over 6 million members.
Along the way we hit a roadblock. At 4 million customers, we had grown as far as we could with the existing product and design. Several new features had been bolted on and while there was consistency with the experience, the whole of the product wasn't cohesive. The lean startup days were also giving way to a mature product, one that needed evolve. I worked with the board and senior management to begin to grow the design team within product. We brought on two designers to be able to tackle the next phase.
With the further investment into the Design & UX team, we went about further evolving the site and app experience. At the time, the design sprint workshop was just beginning to be shared on the Google Ventures blog, and it seemed like a perfect tool to better engage stakeholders within the company. We had relied on leveraging our earlier understanding of members augmented with regular usability testing, however our internal process came with some fricton, particularly as we were too siloed and stakeholders weren't engaged early enough in the journey, leading to some poorly received feedback. Design sprints allowed us to collaborate, bringing the diverse voices to the room at the start, and to more rapidly test all our ideas.
After several design sprints, we had a better experience for our members, and a clearer design vision. There was one change on the horizon that brought with it the next phase—expansion and a possible rebrand. Since the beginning every external agency made the same offer, to give us a rebrand including a new name. While Quidco ultimately remained, it was never going to work outside the UK. With expanison plans being drawn up, we needed not only a new name, but to refine and reduce the cashback journey to one that could be more easily ported to other countries. Working with PS London, we workshopped hundreds of names and distilled the options down to Shoop. This name was applied to the new cashback platform in France, and rebranded the German cashback product (previously Qipu). The UX system developed with the team was then used to create the Shoop experience.
"Get Paid to Shop" & "Rewarding Shopping Every Day"
Midway through my tenure I had a few opportunities to help with Quidco's advertising, as well as the slogan. Collaborating with award-winning copywriter Simon Carbery (formerly of Saatchi & Saatchi, and Leo Burnett), we developed the "Get Paid to Shop" advertising campaign that was seen throughout the capital on taxis, and importantly on the London Underground. The campaign was also a manifesto to what Quidco was, as illustrated with the large wordy poster found across from Tube platforms. This was at a time when the Quidco brand was also evolving from the original Lino Letter wordmark with typographic smile, into the existing brandmark. During the transition, and in this campaign, I used an element of the typographic smile.
"Get Paid to Shop" was to the point. But it was only one aspect of the Quidco product. We needed a clear slogan, one with multiple meanings. Enter "Rewarding shopping every day", a collaboration with our in-house writer, the new slogan fitted well with the brand that had now fully evolved. The ".com" was removed from the logo and I had stopped using the partial typographic element.
Quidco today
Quidco has continued to grow and evolve over the years since I left, but many of the core experience I helped design remain on the 2024 site. The branding has stayed true, and much of the look and feel fits within the initial guidelines. It's wonderful to see a cleaner typefaced used on the landing page, elevating the brand with a more modern look. Now with over 10 million members, Quidco remains a strong contender in the marketplace, shepherded by the stellar team at Moneysupermarket.