A John Lewis Christmas miracle
How we delivered our app Christmas countdown in a matter of weeks
Co-authored by Sophie Skinner, Experience Designer and Daniel McGuire, User Interface Designer at John Lewis Partnership.
At John Lewis we are renowned for Christmas, bringing together festive joy and a sprinkle of delight during the holiday season. This year the Apps Team had a chance to unwrap unique possibilities by bringing Christmas to life through experience design.
The idea
We challenged ourselves to think —
How might we delight our customers in the app and provide them with more reasons to download, open and regularly engage with our brand?
Our hypothesis
Due to the opportunity to use the Christmas season to support customer engagement over a period where brands historically over index in one timers
We believed providing a stimulating, fun and rewarding experience
Would encourage customers to download the app, improve engagement and increase acquisition to the membership scheme.
Where it all began: understanding our customers
In Summer 2023, we ran cross-functional workshops to identify and prioritise business assumptions; working with stakeholders across the business in Loyalty, Online Trade, Proposition and Omni Orchestration. Following the creation of empathy maps crafted from our core customer segments, a comprehensive customer journey was developed. These maps helped us to validate our riskiest assumptions and generate hypothesis statements.
Generating ideas
3 potential concepts were shortlisted from the workshops and were tested with participants to gauge resonance, identify barriers, and explore any novel ideas. The 'Countdown to Christmas' concept emerged as promising, contingent on the rewards offered. Subsequent testing revealed that simplicity in the mechanism encouraged customer return, emphasising the need for clear communication on reward types before launch and a prominent presence in loyalty emails. This empathetic approach laid the foundation for a strategy that truly aligned with our customers' expectations.
So what happened next?
After delivering another exciting My John Lewis Members’ Week online experience, we seized the opportunity to tackle Christmas. Due to changing priorities we now had a tight timeframe. This meant that we had 2 months to define, create, develop and test the proposition before going live on 1 December.
Our role was to further develop the initial ideas that were tested and analyse stakeholder feedback. We reflected on the previous findings and extracted needs and requirements from this. Throughout the design process we tried to keep as many features as we could from the concepts that tested well. We looked at both direct and indirect competitors to get a comprehensive picture of the market and discover opportunities. This helped us to pinpoint what features worked well and understand the expectations customers might have.
How the design unfolded
We started with how might we (HMW) statements to help us refocus on user needs and seek inspiration.
Some examples of our HMWs were:
- HMW provide relevant rewards to hook customers early on?
- HMW create a simple mechanism to reveal a reward?
- HMW encourage customers to return to the app every day?
- HMW help customers to understand the proposition and the rewards?
- HMW incorporate the Christmas advert into the product?
- HMW balance technical limitations without compromising the user experience?
From these statements we brainstormed solutions with our team and stakeholders. Technical feasibility feedback influenced direction and brand requests impacted the UI and copy. From low to high fidelity wireframes we pushed to create a delightful customer experience that was accessible, fun and importantly feasible within the timeframe.
We settled on the concept which was finally named the 12 Treats of Christmas.
The experience went through 7 iterations of the user journey:
5 different UI treatments:
In response to tech, stakeholder feedback and evolving Christmas advert assets.
13 Omnichannel entry points were defined:
Working with developers
Proof of concepts were built using Compose UI and Swift UI on Android and iOS. We used these prototypes to communicate the experience to stakeholders and work through development feasibility and prioritised requirements. From this we realised certain ideas needed to be simplified, such as the doors shown below had to be in a uniform format. This approach helped to ensure our concepts were achievable in the timeframe and addressed accessibility considerations, dynamic text, and rendering issues.
Adding moments of delight
Through the introduction of layered scrolling, snow animations and the John Lewis Christmas advert assets we were able to elevate the experience.
Championing accessibility
From the outset, despite the tight timeframes, one thing we were not prepared to compromise on was accessibility.
We prioritised:
- Careful use of patterns in backgrounds
- Catering for dynamic text scaling
- Intuitive VoiceOver and TalkBack
- Logical focus order
- Speed and duration of animations
- Thorough accessibility testing using Fable
Final releases
The experience was deployed to the App stores in early November to allow enough time for customers to install the correct version on their devices ahead of 1st December launch.
After meeting the first release, we had two weeks where we could make refinements and enhancements before the final go live.
Improvements we made:
Onboarding
- We reduced the cognitive load by reducing copy.
- Added icons and imagery to give the benefits more standout.
- Rewrote copy to set clear expectations following more reward changes.
Calendar doors
- We updated door states in response to changing rewards.
- Introduced expired, redeemed and activated badging to help communicate reward states more clearly.
Messaging and interaction
- We enhanced messaging on native prompts.
- Enabled auto scroll to next available door.
The Christmas miracle — go live
The work didn’t stop once we went live. Members of the team were up at midnight each of the 12 days to watch the treats unlocking in real time, complete device testing, and in some cases put fixes in. The project team caught up daily so we could respond to any feedback/issues identified across social, customer care and in-store.
Usability testing
We ran a 12 day diary study while the proposition was live to retrospectively validate ideas. This in-the-moment feedback helped us to see how feelings and opinions evolved over time. The insights that our research team have collected are very rich with ~900 minutes of footage to analyse. This will help us to improve the experience for future optimisations.
Additionally we ran the experience through accessibility testing using Fable. This was tested with participants using a screen reader across Android and iOS. Feedback from the test highlighted that the experience had no accessibility issues whatsoever, which was testament to the team championing accessibility throughout. As shown in one piece of feedback received from a Fable tester:
“This level of in-app accessibility is a delight to see.”
Next steps
We hope to continue to learn as much as possible from every source we have available to us, as we were not able to test prior to go live. Analysing customer feedback collated across the omni-sphere; social media, feedback forms, customer care and in-store. We plan to work with our research team to deep dive into the 12 day diary study and leverage analytics to build a full picture of how the 12 Treats performed. This will help us to spot any trends we may want to address for next year.
Reflections
How did we deliver this on time? Short answer: Teamwork!
As cliché as that may well sound, we quickly responded to what was required of us in the time available. The biggest learning for us was just how adaptable and resilient the team could be. We found a truly efficient process. Design and development had never been so close, working side by side throughout, being open and honest, and checking the feasibility of ideas constantly to avoid delays.
