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A unified hub for engaging and rewarding friends and fans of The Ohio State University.
UX & Visual Design
Basis
Customer Loyalty
2016–2019
Buckeye Nation Rewards (BNR) is the official loyalty and rewards program for fans, students, alumni, and faculty of the The Ohio State University (OSU). Launched in the fall of 2018 as a responsive web app with native mobile apps for iOS and Android, it has gained over 60,000 members in one year, keeping them actively engaged with the university while building strong partnerships between OSU and its sponsors.
I focused on UX, visual design, and asset creation on both web and native mobile platforms, as well as concept development of the proprietary tool powering the program, Perk Social.
As the 3rd largest university in the nation with one of the most watched football teams, OSU came to us with a massive network of fans, but no holistic way to connect with them. With BNR, my team at Basis created an interactive, unified hub for all things OSU. Whether you are a student looking for deals around campus, an alumnus staying up-to-date with research and advancements at the university, a die-hard fan following Buckeye sports, or a faculty member completing training and learning about your benefits, you can find it all on BNR.
I created joint user journeys to illustrate how we could use the same user flow along with targeted content to create a simple rewards program that is scalable to serve OSU’s broad audience.
Not only was the university missing out on engagement to strengthen its fan base, but its partners were missing out on millions of impressions with OSU’s expansive network. By collecting all of the university’s fans in one place, OSU now has a massive marketing tool to incentivize current partners to build up their relationship and foster new partnerships with companies that can get the exposure they desire. As these alliances grow, the benefits are being passed along to the fans, with BNR members being offered bigger, better prizes and rewards.
Starting with welcome emails, users are guided through the program benefits and learn how they can be rewarded for their engagement with OSU. Once onboarded, they see the challenges they may complete to earn instant rewards, contest entries, and points to redeem for prizes from OSU and its partners.
BNR is a rewards platform based on Perk Social, a self-serve customer loyalty product I helped develop at Basis, where users complete tasks to earn points, prizes, or contest entries. The tasks, called challenges, include a wide range of interactions — watching videos, reading articles, taking surveys and quizzes, location check-ins, engaging on social networks, etc. — that needed to be simple and cohesive from both an admin and a user perspective. A program may be filled with quizzes and articles one day and videos and social shares the next. To account for all of these activities, we created card-based challenges for users and a familiar, informative dashboard for admins.
The custom instance created for OSU included buildout of a few unique features, like the integration of a live mini-game members play on the app during halftime to compete for prizes and automatic user segmentation so a fan would not come into BNR and see employee training videos and benefits.
