Bitiba Membership

There was no design brief at kickoff. Not a vague one, none. So the first piece of work was writing it. Through stakeholder conversations and a look at where the platform actually stood, the scope came down to three things: make the price advantage visible and credible, introduce a lean membership to drive registrations, and clean up the catalogue behind the scenes.

Before designing anything I looked at how other European retailers run lean loyalty programmes, weighing tiers, pricing visibility, and how the membership sits inside the shop rather than beside it. The useful finding wasn't a feature, it was a pattern: the programmes that work say what you get before they ask for anything, and they keep one recognisable voice across every screen. The ones that don't bury the benefit behind a sign-up wall.

I mapped a simplified customer journey, less to document it than to have something on a wall the team could argue with. It worked, because the map turned into a short ideation session, and the session is where the integration points actually got decided.

Three came out of it and they set the rest of the project: show the saving early, on the product page, before anyone is asked to commit; fold registration into the shopping flow instead of making it a detour; and say something after the purchase, when the benefit has just been felt rather than merely promised.

The first direction treated the membership as its own thing: a name, its own palette, branding that made it recognisable wherever it appeared. The competitor work supported it, as identity was one of the three things the good programmes had in common, and a membership with a face is easier to talk about, easier to market, and easier to extend later.

It got scaled back to one thing: access to lower prices. No name, no separate identity, no second brand to maintain. Stakeholder priorities and the timeline, and I pushed on it more than once before agreeing.

They were right, and it took me a while to see it. A separate identity on a platform whose entire proposition is this is the cheap one is a second story competing with the first. The lean version says the only thing that needed saying. What I did hold onto was the structure underneath, made up of the integration points, the messaging slots, and the places where a richer offer could go later without a rebuild.

The live nature of the platform pushed me into high fidelity earlier than I'd normally go. Wireframes are cheap to change and expensive to argue about with people who are already building.

The hardest screen was the product page, and the reason is arithmetic. It has to show a member price and a non-member price at once, make the gap between them obvious, and still read cleanly to someone who has no intention of joining. Push the member price too hard and every non-member feels they're being charged a penalty. Underplay it and nobody signs up.

What settled it was giving each price a different job rather than a different size: the RRP struck through as context, the member price as the number you act on, the saving stated plainly rather than dressed up as a badge. The same logic runs through the basket and the order summary, where the discount stays broken out on its own line all the way to the total, so the number never has to be taken on trust.

Moderated sessions with five colleagues and five potential customers, running both the current site and the new prototype from product page through to purchase. Same task, both versions, so the comparison came from them rather than from me.

Most preferred the new one, and for the reason it was built: they could see what they'd save without having to work it out. That was the part that held.

Two things didn't. Several people understood the discount perfectly and still couldn't explain what the membership actually was. The saving landed, the programme didn't, which meant the messaging was doing half its job. And in checkout, where the simplified address entry went down well, people asked for guest checkout: removing the detour into registration had quietly removed the option to skip it entirely.

Both went back into the design, touching copy, layout, and how the membership gets explained rather than just applied.