Tierred referrals
Acquistion UX research
Product/ UX-UI
2025
In order to boost acquisition for Q3 2025, tierred referrals was introduced as a solution to onboard more users. This project was undertaken in phases, ranging from research on why people arent referring enough people in Aspire, through user surveys. Next was redesigning the referral page through heuristic analysis and conducting usability tests. The final 3rd step was dedicated for handoff and DS alignment. The initial goal was to boost referrals via active accounts from 8% -> 15-20%
Conducted 3 user interviews and 2 usability tests
Revamped the referral page to improve task completion rate
Designed a tierred referral system with gamification for better UX and user engagement
Role
UX researcher, UI build, Design QA
Collaborators
Senior PM (Acquisition), Design manager, Associate Product Designer, Product designer (DS)
Duration
25 days
Tools
Typeform, Confluence, Figma, Fellow
Our referral program was not increasing the number of active accounts annually by a big margin, which needed optimization
8%
-Percentage of active accounts that referred more than 1 person last year
Through a preliminary survey, 60 % of our users mentioned that they werent even aware of the in-app referral program while 35% cited that they prefer cash rewards
Discovering the problem
To understand what we were solving for, we first floated a preliminary survey on Typeform and then drilled down further to get to the root of the problem. The initial User survey helped us segregate users into 2 cohorts, which were- 1) Users who werent aware of the referral program, 2) Users who preffered monetary rewards as an incentive for floating out referrals.
User survey prelim- questions
We noticed that you haven't referred anyone to Aspire yet, What is the main reason? What is your preference for a reward type? How did you learn about Aspire's referral program?
User interviews
After the cohorts were divided through the User survey prelim, we focused on cohort 2 for revamping the referral page design. Along with an Associate Product Designer, we conducted 4 user interviews, which helped us justify the revamp of the referrals page and adding the tierred referrals feature. A script with a profile warmup was prepared with questions that delved into - 1. How long they have been using Aspire 2. Understanding their experience with Aspire to gauge whether low confidence in product is a factor of less referrals 3. Exploring their past behaviours and motivations for referrals 4. Understanding their expectations of reward types
After these findings, we aimed to improve this feature and ask:
How might we improve the discoverability and UX of an in-app referral program to boost acquisition?
User stories to guide the design!
As an Aspire user, i want to
Obstacles faced through the project
Aligning with multiple stakeholders and reaching a decision
While revamping the referral page after a heuristic analysis, aligning with members of the design team as well as the Senior PM (Acquisition) proved challenging. To come to a conclusion, each iteration was documented along with the comments in Figma, to justify design decisions, on top of the analysis from the user interviews.
Sticking to the scope of the project
Through the course of the project, I came across various ideas to enhance the UX of reffering another person; a) displaying social media icons to share directly on social platforms; b) allowing users to send reminders to already sent referrals through a CTA. However the outlined scope was not able to cover this even though time was spent into exploring these options, which in hindsight could have been better utilised.
Ideation and design
The entire referral page was revamped after aligning with the Director, Senior PM and Design Manager and dev handoff was coordinated to release the changes in the upcoming monthly release. Tierred referrals was also introduced along with a visual indicator to enhance user engagement through gamification.Since research indicated that the reward was low, we also ran A/B tests by modifying the prices through our internal dashboard to gain insights into what exact price our customers would prefer.
What we discovered from usability testing of the new referral page with 4 of our active account users-
Ease of finding referrals/Discovery flow was rated 4/5
Ease of checking the status/ making referrals was rated 4/5. Friction point- needing to manually copy email address from email client
" Perhaps we could add a nudge to remind the referees who haven't registered yet"- user feedback
Solving for insights
This is scheduled for the next monthly release, so no working explanations yet!
Reflections
The entire journey of this project was something that felt extremely rewarding as all actions taken were aligned with how our users informed us on the product. Although the product team initially assumed tierred referrals as a concept was a guaranteed success in increasing acquisition, the research uncovered insights that did not lean towards any particular reward type that our users wanted. However, we still went ahead with tierred referrals as research was inconclusive. Another insight that was surprising was that the discovery flow itself was lacking. This was something that was not even included in the PMs spec sheet. Hence, this exercise reinforced my belief that design will always get better the more we reach out to our customers. UX research for the win!
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