KFC Rewards: turning loyalty into a habit worth sharing

I led the design of Reward Sharing from discovery through delivery. I worked with Product, Engineering, Commercial and our external partners to understand what customers needed, define the feature, test the experience and prepare it for release.

There were three things to balance throughout:

We considered:

Reward Sharing gave existing customers something useful to do with a prize while giving a new customer a reason to join. The workshop helped us agree on that direction before detailed design began.

Reward Sharing added another person to the loyalty journey. That sounds like a small addition to the Arcade, but it introduced questions about who owned a reward, when it could be shared, how the recipient claimed it, and what happened if they were new to the app. I had to make that journey clear to customers while working within the rules of KFC’s loyalty platform.

We needed the reward to feel worth sending and straightforward to claim. The design had to work with Antavo, the platform managing reward ownership, coupons and redemption, and with the wider Rewards Arcade campaign led by RAPP.

I reviewed loyalty experiences including Costa Coffee and McDonald’s to see how they handled sharing and engagement. Sharing existed in some programmes, but I did not find it widely used across the quick-service products I reviewed.

That gave us a useful starting point. We could look at sharing patterns customers might already recognise, while working out how those patterns would fit KFC’s rewards and Antavo’s rules. I brought those examples into early conversations with Product and Engineering about the interaction and its likely complexity.

I worked with the Product Owner on acceptance criteria so Design, Product and Engineering were working towards the same experience.

Once we had agreed on the requirements, I mapped four journeys: sharing a reward just won, sharing one already held, receiving one as an existing member, and receiving one as a new customer.

The flows let us work through ownership, coupon rules, expiry and error states before development.

As Engineering investigated what Antavo could support, I updated the journeys with them. They gave us a shared way to discuss the edge cases instead of discovering them after the screens were designed.

I designed the final screens using KFC’s existing design system. The new behaviour needed clear signals: whether a reward could be shared, who owned it, whether it had already been sent and what the customer should do next.

The journey began when someone won a reward. They could share it, their friend could receive it, and the friend could redeem it through the reward screen already used in the app. I wanted the sharing step to feel like part of KFC Rewards, with no separate way of claiming a prize to learn.

The work introduced elements that could be useful beyond Reward Sharing, including personalised reward tags, status indicators, instructional banners and information cards. I added them to KFC’s Figma design system so another loyalty feature could use the same patterns.

That also gave the team a consistent way to show reward status and explain unfamiliar actions as the programme grew.

I prepared the Figma files and interaction details for Engineering and made sure the reusable components were ready to use.

I stayed involved during implementation. Regular check-ins gave us a way to answer interaction questions, respond as we learned more about the platform and review builds against the design. That mattered for a feature with several routes into it and rules that customers should not have to think about.

All three measures remained up in the second month.

The interface was only one part of getting Reward Sharing into customers’ hands. The workshop helped us choose where to focus. The flows helped us work through Antavo’s rules. Testing showed us where we could remove explanation, and working with Engineering throughout helped us carry those decisions into the build.