Barnes & Noble Membership Research
During the 1980s and 1990s, Barnes & Noble was the dominant bookseller, and their $25 annual membership was a big business builder. As customers turned to digital reading and purchasing, Barnes & Noble has been making moves to address this market challenge. One of the most challenging areas being their outdated and complex membership program. Our team was tasked with re-envisioning Barnes & Noble Membership at all levels through a Modern Membership approach.
—The Ask
Conduct customer research to develop a New Membership Playbook that evolves the B&N Membership Program from a discount program to a valuable compelling experience.
Let’s bring Barnes & Nobles into the 21th century
Our multi-disciplinary team (loyalty, research, product) set off on a mission to rethink the way customers – past, present, future – feel about the Barnes & Noble Membership Program. With research and business goals in mind, we identified our project plan.
01. Frame Activities:
Current membership program audit, Competitive/Best-in-class Assessment, Qualitative Customer Research, Quantitative Research
We read the Room
For the sake of time our team split research duties. The researcher and I lead the qualitative research. Over 3 weeks we traveled to many locations and spoke with many book lovers. We interviewed over 20 people and documented our findings.
02. Learn:
Synthesis, Persona Creation, Define Opportunity Areas, Technology Assessment
The Sensemaking Process
We then started synthesizing our finding from the field. This allowed us to start looking for patterns and extract themes by forcing comparisons. We drew audience insights that informed our four personas. This was critical since the new membership program need to fit the needs of all audiences.
03. Ideate Activities:
Journey Mapping, Financial Model, Membership Concepting
Out of the box thinking
Our personas and insights set us up to think big and concept anything our customers would love to see in the new membership program. We came up with over 30 concepts and created posters to help explain our intentions during our stakeholder workshop.
04. Concept Activities:
Workshop, Prioritize Key Concepts
Work it out
As the last step before playbook creation, we conducted a highly interactive workshop. We presented our membership concepts and broke out into groups with T3 moderators to discuss and fill out our concept posters. Each group presented their posters which then lead to the full group going through a dot voting exercise to refine exactly what would be included in our membership playbook recommendations.
— Our Membership Recommendation
The outcomes from the workshop resulted in our recommendation. We needed to evolve the paid membership program, start a direct relationship with millions of non-member customers with a free program, and launch a new tech platform to support the changes.
I was then tasked with visualizing marketing materials for the new Membership Program.
The new B&N Membership
is more in every way.
More personal. More family. More committed to literacy. More rewarding through recognition, access and, of course, savings.
Company: T3
Date: 2019
My Role: Lead Sr. Product Designer
Team: Sr. Product Designer, Loyalty Specialist, Researcher, Project Manager