SapientNitro Internship

During the summer of 2015, between my first and second year of graduate school, I had the opportunity to work as a UX Intern for SapientNitro in their Boston office. After graduating in May of 2016, I returned to SapientNitro and am now a full time member of the Experience Design team.  

As a UX intern, I spent the majority of my time working with the Experience Design team on a range of client projects, including work for LL Bean and Voya Financial. By helping with several projects, this internship experience allowed me to see how UX interacts with clients at all steps of the process - ranging from research to ideation to wireframes.

About 25% of my time as an intern was spent working on a project with the summer interns in other domains. This project came from Dunkin’ Donuts, one of SapientNitro’s biggest clients. This internship project was not internal - we had the opportunity to work with Dunkin’ Donuts marketing and present our pitch at their headquarters at the end of the summer. While my client work is confidential, please take a look through the pitch we brought to Dunkin’ Donuts.

The Ask

The Dunkin' Donuts loyalty program's marking group asked our team to pitch ways they could increase their millennial acquisition. While they are a large company, Dunkin' Donuts has not seen the same return on their loyalty program as their competitors, particularly with a younger crowd.

The Pitch

At the end of the summer, we pitched three ideas to Dunkin' Donuts to help increase millenial acquisition of their mobile app and loyalty, DD Perks. This was done in an hour long presentation, a short video to explain one of the concepts, and a Q and A session. A link to the presentation file can be found here. The content of the document was put together by the whole team and Isaac Morrier led the visual design. 

The first and second of the three ideas we pitched were based around campaigns. I was very hands on thinking about the user's over all experience and also helped build a prototype for one of the concepts. However, I spent the most time working on the final of the three concepts, Dunkin' Run.  

Dunkin' Run

During our interviews with Dunkin' Donuts, we found that one new feature they were very excited about was mobile ordering. A new version of their app was going to allow their users to order their coffee through a credit card setup in the app and pick it up at a set time. 

Dunkin' Run takes this process one step further. Rather than only allowing a person to order coffee with their card for themselves, Dunkin' Run adds the ability to message friends and let them know you're going to get coffee. They can then send you their order. If a contact does not have the Dunkin' Donuts app on their phone, they would receive a text message notification, telling them their friend wants to pick them up a cup of coffee and all they need to do is download the app. The text would also let them know that their first cup of coffee with the loyalty program is free. Once all the orders have been sent, the original user would receive a QR code they can scan to pick up the order. 

The video below shows this process in action. The video was put together by Thomas Mendosa. I assisted with writing the script.

The prototype in the video was put together using Sketch and Invision. This was also the prototype I used when user testing the interface. The animation showcases the interactions. 

While pitching a new feature to their app, I also took time to talk to the marketing team about some of the research I did on the current performance of their application. I spent a lot of time up front looking at both the performance and the visuals of their applications, as well as talking to potential users about their thoughts. I offered a condensed version of a heuristic evaluation to showcase how not only better app performance, but small user experience changes, like social login and contextualized notifications can really add to the user experience. 

Throughout our research process, both primary and secondary research showed us that social is a main driver for the millennial generation. One of our main insights was that for a millennial generation, acquisition is engagement. In order for users to download the app, their friends need to be using it. To sell this moment to Dunkin', we referenced a very popular app that relies on social drivers, Venmo. People don't download an app like Venmo because they see an ad, they download it because their friends ask them if they can pay them using Venmo. They download it because their friends are already engaged.

If Dunkin' were to have this feature that requires users download it to connect with their friends in some way, if they create a moment where people need the Dunkin' Donuts app, they are far more likely to find a millennial audience. 

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