KFC App Growth — Reward Sharing
& Habit-Forming Social Features
UX/UI — Reward Sharing & Habit-Forming Social Features
UX/UI — Reward Sharing & Habit-Forming Social Features
KFC wanted to apply game mechanics to their app by launching a new in app arcade game. My role as Senior Product Designer was to lead the design of a reward-sharing feature that would accompany the launch of the new game while increasing engagement, driving new sign-ups, and turning one-time users into repeat customers through social and habit-forming mechanics.
Three clear goals driving every decision:
I facilitated a remote ideation workshop with the wider digital team, including the Product Owner, Product Manager, Developers, Designers, and Commercial Revenue team. We ran structured rounds of idea generation, presentation, and refinement to align on concepts that could drive habits and expose customers to more of the menu.
Three ideas were prioritised for research:
Most ideas focused on individual reward usage, but introducing a social loop presented a unique opportunity to drive engagement and acquisition. This led to the decision to focus on reward sharing.
I conducted a competitor review to validate the reward-sharing concept. While Costa Coffee offered reward sharing, competitors like McDonald's did not, presenting an opportunity for KFC to differentiate its loyalty experience.
I informed the team of the design effort and time frame to deliver user flows and test the designs. Reward-sharing was selected and the development team started investigating the system capability to build this as I designed it.
I aligned with the Product Owners to discuss the project's scope and define five key acceptance criteria:
I created four user flows to capture all scenarios:
One of the challenges was incorporating the unreleased KFC arcade game as a way of users winning rewards. Flows were peer-reviewed with the Product Owner and Development team. Another challenge was the platform capabilities were still being explored by the engineers, I annotated the flows with notes to focus engineering investigations. This ensured alignment and reduced rework later.
With agreed-upon user flows, I designed wireframes and screen flows for the updated screens. Regular check-ins with the Development team ensured feasibility and allowed iterative updates as technical capabilities were clarified.
After updating the user flows and wireframes to match the platform build capability I applied the KFC design system to create a polished UI for the new screens. Key focus areas included:
A prior project revealed that users were confused by the KFC Arcade game, generating numerous customer support queries. To address this, I designed reusable "how-to" screens for the reward-sharing feature, which could be scaled across the app to reduce user confusion and future support needs.
As I was designing new screens to solve a known problem that would be crucial to the experience of the new feature, I conducted guerrilla usability tests on the main flow and how-to screens. Key finding: users instinctively swiped through the carousel, making the instructional copy unnecessary. Removing it increased white space and improved visual clarity, demonstrating that small adjustments can meaningfully enhance user experience.
I updated the KFC design system in Figma with the new elements and presented the designs in a sign-off meeting with the Product Owner, Product Manager, Developers, Designers, and Commercial Revenue team. After approval, I prepared handover files and participated in weekly developer check-ins to resolve implementation questions and ensure fidelity to the design vision.
These results validated the introduction of social mechanics and habit-forming design as drivers for engagement, acquisition, and loyalty.
This project highlighted the value of designing for behaviour, not just features. By introducing reward sharing, I shifted the experience from transactional to social, driving both engagement and acquisition through a single mechanism. Working alongside evolving technical constraints strengthened my approach to close collaboration with engineering, ensuring solutions were both ambitious and feasible. A key learning was addressing user confusion from the KFC Arcade by creating reusable "how-to" screens, which improved clarity and can scale across the app. Going forward, I would explore deeper personalisation and experimentation to optimise which reward behaviours drive the strongest long-term engagement.
