KFC Rewards: turning loyalty into a habit worth sharing

The challenge was much broader than designing a new screen. It meant balancing customer needs, business objectives and evolving technical capabilities while working across multiple teams and external partners — including the Antavo loyalty platform and RAPP, the agency behind the wider Rewards Arcade campaign.

Rather than treating Reward Sharing as an isolated feature, we designed it as part of a connected loyalty experience — one that would deepen engagement among existing customers while building a direct route to new-customer acquisition.

As Senior Product Designer, I led Reward Sharing from discovery through to delivery — and the role extended well beyond interface design.

I worked across cross-functional teams to understand customer needs, define product requirements, explore technical constraints and align stakeholders around a solution that could actually ship.

Answering that question meant holding three perspectives in tension — none of which could win outright.

Although Reward Sharing looked like a single feature, it was part of a much larger loyalty transformation — and delivering it meant working with two external partners as much as with internal teams.

Antavo provided the platform powering reward management. Its capabilities set the core rules of the experience — reward ownership, one-time sharing, coupon logic and redemption — so understanding those constraints early was what kept the experience simple for customers while remaining technically achievable.

RAPP led the wider Rewards Arcade campaign. Aligning Reward Sharing with that broader activity kept the customer journey consistent across KFC's digital ecosystem, even where it reached beyond the app.

We weighed three directions against customer value, technical feasibility and business impact:

Reward Sharing emerged as the strongest opportunity: it created value for existing customers while encouraging new ones to join the programme — and it gave the wider team confidence in the direction before we moved into detailed design.

With a direction chosen, I researched how other loyalty programmes approached sharing and engagement, reviewing products including Costa Coffee and McDonald's.

Sharing existed in some programmes but remained uncommon across the quick-service sector. That reinforced the opportunity — KFC could build a more socially driven loyalty experience — and because the pattern already existed elsewhere, customers would likely understand it immediately. The findings also grounded early conversations with Product and Engineering, surfacing common interaction patterns and helping estimate implementation complexity.

Working with the Product Owner, I set acceptance criteria that gave Product, Engineering and Design a shared definition of success — balancing a simple customer experience, KFC's growth goals, and what the Antavo platform could actually support.

Once the requirements were agreed, I mapped the complete Reward Sharing experience — not to document screens, but to give Product, Engineering and Design a shared artefact for exploring feasibility and edge cases before development began.

The flows covered four scenarios — sharing a won reward, sharing an existing one, and receiving a reward as either an existing member or a brand-new customer — alongside the system rules for ownership, coupon logic, expiry and error states.

As Engineering investigated the Antavo platform, these flows evolved with them — a shared tool that reduced implementation risk rather than a hand-off.

I translated the interaction model into high-fidelity designs using KFC's Design System. Customers already knew the app's visual language, so the work was extending it to support Reward Sharing while keeping everything consistent — making clear which rewards could be shared, who owned them, their sharing status, and the next step for existing and new customers alike.

The behaviour reads as a single loop: win a reward, share it, a friend receives it — and from there they redeem it through the same reward screen every member already uses. No new pattern to learn on either side; the moment of winning simply becomes a reason to bring someone else in.

As new functionality emerged, I identified opportunities to build reusable components rather than one-off solutions — personalised reward tags, status indicators, instructional banners and information cards. I added these new elements to KFC's Figma design system so future loyalty features could inherit the same patterns rather than solving the same interaction problems again.

Designing at this level meant the project delivered value beyond its own release. By strengthening the foundations of KFC's design system, Reward Sharing made the next loyalty feature easier and faster to ship.

For me, delivery didn't begin when the designs were finished — it continued through implementation. I prepared the experience for development, organising the final Figma files, documenting interactions and getting the reusable components ready for Engineering.

Then I stayed involved. Regular check-ins with developers let us clarify interaction behaviours, resolve questions quickly, validate technical decisions as the platform's capabilities evolved, and review builds against the intended design — keeping design quality intact and ownership shared rather than handed over.

The gains held into a second month — pointing to a sustained behavioural change rather than a launch spike.

Reward Sharing was only one part of the wider Rewards Arcade, but it contributed directly to KFC's broader goal: building longer-term customer relationships through digital engagement.

Reward Sharing reinforced that the quality of a solution depends on the quality of the alignment behind it. The experience was shaped as much by business objectives, platform capabilities and technical constraints as by user needs — and getting those to agree was the real work. Facilitating workshops, partnering with Engineering and understanding what partners like Antavo could support all shaped the final experience as much as the interface did.