Microsoft Rewards Program UX Redesign

Discovery

Site Audit Feedback Sample

Site analysis

To understand how to best approach a UX redesign for Bing rewards, we started by analyzing the site’s current experience and understanding what might motivate users through phases of earning, rewards browsing, and points redemption.

Original Site UX:

Design Audit Summary

Key Focus Areas

• Visual Design: Improve visual hierarchy, contrast, labeling, and color usage to enhance clarity and engagement.

• UX Improvements: Strengthen interaction feedback, continuity, language, and UI behaviors.

• Validation & Testing: Gather user insights and apply MUX principles to refine information architecture and visuals for a more engaging experience.

Observations & Opportunities

• Visual Hierarchy: Key information (e.g., earned points, goals) lacks prominence. Empty space could be better utilized.

• Dashboard Experience: Needs clearer focal points, personalized views, and more engaging messaging. Gamification and social elements (e.g., competitive rankings, goal tracking) could enhance motivation.

• Engagement & Clarity: Visual contrast, chunking, and progressive disclosure can improve scannability and usability.

• Content & Messaging: More emotionally resonant imagery, personalized messaging, and clear CTAs will drive interaction.

Recommended Enhancements

1. Dashboard: Highlight goal progress, earning opportunities, and personalized rewards.

2. Earn View: Showcase new opportunities, largest earning areas, and sweepstakes information.

3. Messaging & Personalization: Make interactions feel rewarding, social, and tailored to user behavior.

By refining these areas, the experience can become more engaging, visually compelling, and habit-forming.

Whiteboarding Exercise

User Journeys

To better define the problem space, we conducted a journey mapping session with the product team to externalize their deep knowledge about the customers goals, needs, and behaviors. From this we learned a few key insights.

First, user of the Bing Rewards program didn’t always have a clear understanding of how and when points were being accrued, even though they used the products regularly. We also learned that the XBox Live Rewards users, not surprisingly, had an affinity for gaming mechanics within rewards systems. Which left us asking, how can we make it clear that users are earning and get them excited about earning daily?

Behavioral Archetypes

*Data gathered in team workshop which I co-facilitated, artifact design by Clemente Miller

Design

Dev team collaboration

A key part of the process was refining all these ideas with the development team. Together, we reviewed the wireframes and incorporated feedback to make sure the concepts were meshing with the capabilities of the platform and the tribally agreed upon experience improvement ideas of the dev team.

Design

The Daily Set, Competition, and Goal setting

Set Completion: Engagement Loop

Previously, the landing page for the rewards experience gave you many ways to earn, like the daily quizzes and Bing searches. These were engaging, but didn’t do a good job at giving users a reason to come back every day. With the introduction of set completion, users could now earn extra points by maintaining “streaks” to gain extra points faster.

Design

Goal Setting Notes

Goal Setting: Progressive Disclosure

Setting a goal is a strong motivator for users. While not necessary to earn and redeem, we designed an experience that encouraged Microsoft to provide strong visual feedback as part of the progression towards goals, as well as fun and exciting feedback for streak completion.

Design

Competition: Social Affirmation

Though not currently implemented, we designed many features throughout the daily set experience that allowed for users to invite and compete with friends. This took shape in the form of indicating if your friends had completed Daily Sets before you had as a well as showcasing when they had achieved the next status tier. 

Testing

Testing Results

Testing our ideas to see if the concept and execution was critical. We performed two rounds of UX testing with half a dozen participants and then adjusted our designs based on the findings.

Note: Lead by Amanda Parkhurst

Key Findings

• While people were able to complete the onboarding experience easily, they were left with some questions about point value and redemption, and did not feel that the tasks completed in the onboarding experience represented reality closely enough.

• Participants were able to complete the goal setting task easily, but were left with higher level questions about why they would want to set a goal.

• All participants were able to complete the redemption task easily, and most continued the cycle by setting a new goal after they had redeemed.

Recommendations

Onboarding
• Include a more detailed intro into what the rewards program is, how points are earned and redeemed.
• Create more relevant tutorials that show how points are earned within Bing and Edge.
• Award points in the onboarding experience that are valued at a similar value as Microsoft/Xbox Reward activities.

Goal setting – Create better messaging that gives the user a reason to want to create a goal and how it will benefit them.

Redemption – This process worked well in the testing, so continue to polish this design, but do not change the flow or key messaging.

Value Mapping

A key activity is the Value Mapping exercise. Once design ideas are generated, we perform an evaluation with the key stakeholders and technical team to assess the level of effort vs perceived value towards the customer and the business.

Note: Lead by Clemente Miller

Results

Since its launch, I have been following blogs and feeds of Microsoft Rewards users. There is a wide array of feedback, but most of what I found was positive, with a consistent commentary that users were in fact working hard to maintain streaks. I found users that were nearly hitting triple digits of daily play. 

What I would do differently

Many of the formal design process we ran at the beginning of the project, including the User Journey mapping session and several white board sessions were well intentioned but weren’t well aligned to where our client was actually at. They had deep tribal knowledge that we were not being direct enough about externalizing in a quicker manner. We lost probably 2 weeks because our design team wanted to follow “process rules” instead of just assessing the situation less formally.