Another of our own products, Yolla is a white label loyalty card platform enabling retailers to engage with and reward their most loyal customers.
Approach
From a technical point of view, the project has many facets. First, we have a web app which businesses can sign up to in order to create their bespoke loyalty card, track customers’ transactions, market their branded loyalty scheme online and through printed promotional materials.
Secondly, there is an iPhone app for retailers to scan their customers loyalty cards. It facilitates giving the customers points for their transactions, which can later be redeemed for rewards.
We also needed to enable customers to easily install a reward card. The primary method being Passbook available on iPhones where the user can scan a QR code or visit a unique business URL where it will install a card for them. In order to cover all devices we setup a web based card so Android, Windows Phone and other platform users could easily access their reward card using the same QR code / URL entry point.
Brand
Getting the naming of a product right is important, for this we thought long and hard and the best name to appeal to businesses and customers. The word Yolla is an anagram of ‘loyal’, the key purpose of the platform. It’s also short, memorable and fitted our product perfectly.
We wanted to carry this through visually and create something friendly, recognisable and appealing which we achieved through a customised serif Typeface and bright, modern colour palette.
Design & Development
The business app needed to be as quick and easy to use so as not to get in the way of service. We developed a simple flow based experience which can be completed in a number of seconds after scanning the customers card.
The web app has a lot of data to display, it was important that we visualise information the correct way and create an experience that was valuable to the business owner.
Yolla was built as a Rails 4 application running on Heroku and Postgres.
Customers install 'Yolla Cards' on their phones in the form of Passbook passes, containing an identifying 2D Barcode code which is scanned using the Yolla POS iOS app, and used to transact through the Yolla API. Through Passbook, customers are alerted of nearby business locations when passing in close proximity and points balance updates and marketing messages are sent via the Apple Push Notification Service.
Businesses can also view and analyse transaction and customer data via an interactive dashboard, powered by D3.js, dc.js and Crossfilter.
Yolla is currently beta testing in a select few stores in the UK. If you're a business owner interested in partcipating in the beta you can declare your interest and we will be in touch!