What is Fetch?
Fetch is a mobile app that rewards users with points for specific actions like scanning receipts, shopping online, engaging with partner products, and other activities within the app. These points can be redeemed for gift cards from popular retailers.
Role
Timeline
Team Formation
The Problem
Sarah, a loyal Fetch user, loves earning points on her grocery purchases. However, when she shops at Target, she discovers a frustrating limitation in Fetch's earning model.
Problem illustration. Limitation with her shopping.
Due to Fetch's product-specific model, she can only earn points on specific participating brand products like Pepsi or Tide. She earns no Fetch points on Target's store-brand items, fresh produce, electronics, or home goods.
Sarah's retailer-loyal shopping adversely limits her earning potential.
Limited earning potential flowchart
Sarah realizes she's missing massive earning opportunities:
A $200 Target shopping trip only earns 150 points from 2 participating products, while the remaining $150 worth of Target items earn nothing.
This creates a fundamental gap where loyal customers shopping at major participating retailers like Target, Walmart, and CVS earn dramatically fewer points than they could.
Sarah is frustrated with Fetch's lack of rewards in retailer loyalty space.
Point earning breakdown
Problem Recap —
Product-centric model creates earning gaps: Current system only rewards specific brand purchases, missing most of transactions at participating retailers.
Retailer loyalty goes unrewarded: Fetch has no ways of rewarding retailer loyal user habits.
^^^
Read these for a TLDR :)
Project Goal
Design a native earning experience that rewards users and Fetch for retailer loyal shopping.
and… most importantly,
an experience users will love and be delighted by!
Alignment
Team Alignment
We established an agile design and development process focused on speed to market and rapid iteration.
The team agreed to prioritize launching a Minimum Lovable Product (MLP) that would deliver core value to users while leveraging existing app components and design patterns wherever possible.
This approach allowed us to reduce development time, maintain design consistency, and get the product into users' hands quickly to begin collecting real-user feedback. By building on our established foundation and focusing on essential features first, we could iterate and improve the experience based on actual user behavior rather than assumptions.
Problem Alignment
To ensure cross-functional alignment on the core challenges, we conducted a series of collaborative workshops and research sessions.
After initial fact finding missions from Design, Product, Support, and Sales, here were some key insights we initially grounded ourselves with:
"I only earn points on maybe 30% of what I buy. It's frustrating.."
Fetch User
"Users are asking why they can't earn points on everything they buy online like they do with credit card rewards programs."
Customer Support Lead
"Our online engagement is significantly lower than receipt scanning. Users don't see the value in our current online model."
Product Manager
"We're losing competitive ground to cashback platforms that offer universal earning on online purchases."
Business Development
Key stakeholder insights
We then ran emotional journey mapping exercises to understand user pain points across the flow of the Fetch Shop experience. The highs and lows helped us identify our priorities and focus areas.
Emotional Journey Map
Additionally, we ran competitor analyses which helped us benchmark against leading cashback and affiliate marketing platforms to understand market expectations and differentiation opportunities, while also analyzing Fetch's existing app state to ensure design patterns and clean information architecture stayed intact.
The competitors we analyzed and took note of:
Rakuten
Honey
Rakuten
Shop
Competitive Analysis
Alignment Recap —
Team aligns on an agile process: Focus on speed to market and rapid iteration for quick actionable feedback.
Cross-functional discovery: Conducted workshops with stakeholders of design, product, support, and sales teams to identify core user pain points and competitive gaps.
Design Phases
Foundation & Structure
We began with low-fidelity wireframes and user flow diagrams to establish the core navigation patterns and information architecture. These early iterations focused on mapping out the fundamental user journeys from product discovery through purchase completion, ensuring seamless integration with Fetch's existing app structure. Flowcharts helped us visualize decision points, error states, and the handoffs between our new e-commerce features and established receipt-scanning workflows. This allowed us to validate core concepts and identify potential technical constraints before investing in visual design.
FYI — My sketching style is….. "organized chaos"
Early sketches/whiteboarding
Wireframe ideation
Brand Identity & Visual Exploration
Moving into mid-fidelity designs, we explored the visual identity that would differentiate the shopping experience while maintaining cohesion with Fetch's brand ecosystem. Through iterative design explorations, we developed a distinct visual language that communicated the excitement and novelty of direct earning opportunities. While leveraging existing component libraries for efficiency, we crafted unique elements—iconography, color treatments, and micro-interactions—that would help users immediately recognize and understand this new feature as a premium shopping destination within their familiar Fetch experience.
Brand Identity Breakdown Animation
High-Fidelity Execution / Dev Handoff
The final stage focused on delivering polished, high-fidelity mockups along with detailed developer and animation specifications. Each screen was designed to reflect the complete user flow, incorporating states for loading, errors, and edge cases to remove ambiguity during build. Beyond static visuals, I provided motion design guidance that captured transitions, micro-interactions, and responsive behaviors, ensuring that the final product felt seamless and dynamic.
Hi-Fidelity
This level of detail gave engineering teams clarity on implementation, reduced back-and-forth during development, and ensured that design intent was preserved through launch. By handing off comprehensive specs and annotated animations, we maintained momentum, accelerated delivery, and ensured the shipped product closely mirrored the vision established during design.
FOR DEV FIgma File
Design Phases Recap ————
Start with the foundation: Mapped core user journeys with low-fi sketches and flows, validating concepts and technical constraints early.
Emphasis on For Dev Specs: Delivered high-fi interactive prototypes with a distinct visual identity, polished micro-interactions, and full end-to-end user flows.
Project Release
A Sprint Towards Market
The initial Fetch Shop feature successfully launched in a quick 3 months demonstrating the effectiveness of our MLP approach and establishing a strong foundation for the company's e-commerce expansion strategy. Following our agile development approach, we were able to start accumulating real behavioral insights from ours users.
The Work Ahead
Launch was only the starting point. To ensure long-term adoption and engagement, we needed to dig deeper into how users were experiencing Fetch Shop - identifying friction points, areas of drop-off, and opportunities for growth.
Through user research, A/B testing, and daily KPI tracking, we built a feedback loop that informed rapid iterations and product refinements. This continuous learning approach allowed us to adapt quickly, drive sustained engagement, and evolve the feature into a core part of the Fetch experience.
Iterate & Evolve
A collection of design iterations we made following the initial release:
All of the following went through their own design processes too!
Promotional Campaigns
To drive awareness and engagement, we partnered with GTM and sales to run promotional campaigns that highlighted specific retailers or rewarded general feature usage with bonus points. Early engagement metrics showed that users were highly responsive to incentives but often unaware of new or promoted retailers. By embedding promotions directly into Fetch Shop, we not only boosted usage but also increased visibility for our partners, giving users a clear reason to come back and explore more frequently.
Promotional Campaign Banners
Search on Shop Tab
With rapid retailer expansion, engagement metrics began showing longer scroll times and higher drop-offs. Interviews confirmed what the numbers hinted at: users wanted a faster way to find their preferred retailers. In response, we added a search function to the Shop tab. This simple but powerful feature gave users direct control over navigation, reducing frustration and ensuring they could always connect with their favorite retailers - leading to improved retention and increased shopping frequency.
Search
Improved Retailer Cards
As the number of retail partners grew, users found it harder to quickly recognize and discover new options. To address this, we redesigned retailer cards to include lifestyle imagery alongside logos and introduced contextual badges to highlight both new and promoted retailers. Together, these updates made scanning effortless, guided attention to fresh, enticing partnerships, and elevated the overall shopping experience—improving satisfaction for users while driving stronger engagement for retailers.
v1
v2
Improved Retailer Cards - Animation
Product Cards
Our engagement funnel analysis revealed a major friction point during browsing - users often abandoned sessions when they couldn’t quickly decide where to shop. To reduce this indecision, we created product cards showcasing popular items from leading retailers and deeplinked users straight to the relevant screen. This streamlined the path to checkout, sped up decision-making, and made the shopping experience more engaging. As a result, users were able to discover value faster, which directly contributed to higher conversions and stronger session activity.
Product Cards - Animation
Personalized Browsing
Our initial approach to browsing was one-size-fits-all, but metrics showed that generic feeds weren’t encouraging repeat engagement. By leveraging user behavior data, we began personalizing feeds to highlight retailers most relevant to each individual. This move made browsing more intuitive and relatable, creating a stickier, more engaging experience. Users felt Fetch Shop was tuned to their habits, which boosted loyalty and drove deeper adoption of the feature.
Personalized Browsing
Fetch Shop Web Extension
Research into shopping habits revealed that many users defaulted to browsing on mobile or web, leaving Fetch Shop underutilized in those moments. To meet users where they were, we developed Fetch’s first web extension, which automatically applied retailer affiliations during online shopping. This extension extended the reach of Fetch Shop beyond mobile, capturing otherwise missed engagement.
Extension callout card
Early Points Release
Delayed reward delivery—ranging from 1 to 90 days—was a consistent pain point uncovered in both user research and engagement metrics. Long wait times dampened enthusiasm and limited repeat use. To address this, we leveraged a user risk score that allowed us to release points earlier for lower-risk users. Shortening the reward loop created faster gratification, boosted trust in the system, and drove stronger repeat behavior, ultimately reinforcing the value proposition of Fetch Shop.
No Exclusions, Earn on Everything
One of the loudest frustrations we uncovered in user interviews was around exclusions—particularly that popular retailers like Walmart didn’t qualify for grocery rewards. This was a major barrier in building trust and loyalty. We tackled the issue by allowing users to earn base points even on previously excluded products, while still reserving higher point values for non-excluded items. This change was a massive win for user sentiment, reduced friction in the shopping experience, and increased overall adoption of Fetch Shop.
Project Outcome
Reflecting back…
What went well:
Speed to launch: We went from incubation to MLP in under 3 months, allowing us to collect real user feedback quickly.
User-driven insights: Early research and post-launch feedback shaped our priorities and gave us confidence in where to iterate next.
What didn't go well:
Friction points left unresolved: We went from incubation to MLP in under 3 months, allowing us to collect real user feedback quickly.
Complexity of a 0→1 feature: Fetch Shop introduced a fundamentally new way to earn points, which created user confusion. Next time, we’d simplify the first version further and expand iteratively.