Designing a clearer, more rewarding loyalty experience for millions of riders across 70+ countries
Delivery Hero operates one of the largest delivery platforms globally, with millions of riders working across dozens of markets. To support rider engagement and long-term retention, the platform runs a tier-based loyalty program where riders unlock benefits as they complete deliveries.
The program operates across: 70 countries, 11 Delivery Hero brands, and millions of riders globally. For many riders, loyalty rewards are not just a nice-to-have feature. They are a meaningful part of how riders evaluate whether continuing to work on the platform is worth it.
But over time, it became clear that the experience riders had with the loyalty system did not match the value the program was meant to deliver.
Company
Delivery Hero
Role
Lead Designer
Date
Late 2024 - Mid 2025
Platform
Mobile App
Evolution of the Loyalty Program
Before diving into the redesign, it's important to understand how the loyalty experience reached its current state. The system had gone through several iterations over the years.
V1: The original points program
Delivery Hero initially operated a points-based loyalty system in several markets. Riders accumulated points through deliveries and could redeem them for benefits. While functional, the points model made it harder to communicate progress and motivation clearly.
V2: The Glovo Migration
Following the Glovo integration in 2024, Delivery Hero adopted Glovo’s tier-based loyalty structure. The system introduced clearer progression: Bronze, Silver, Gold, to Diamond. Riders unlock benefits as they reach higher tiers. However, the UI was largely adopted as-is during the migration.
V3: A first visual alignment update
The first design update after migration was mostly cosmetic. Engineering capacity at the time was limited, so the focus was on:
Aligning the UI with Delivery Hero’s design system
Fixing some basic heuristics
Improving visual consistency
But structurally, the experience remained the same. This meant many of the underlying usability problems remained unsolved.
The Real Problem
Our regional feedbacks findings
Validating the Problem
Rather than jumping straight into redesigning the UI, I wanted to understand where the breakdown was actually happening. We looked at the problem from several angles:
Regional Insights
Regional operations teams were the first to surface patterns of confusion from riders interacting with the program. These teams have direct contact with rider support and often see friction earlier than product analytics alone.
Behavioral Signals
We also looked at behavioral patterns and session recordings. Watching riders interact with the loyalty pages made something clear very quickly. Riders weren’t ignoring the feature. They were trying to understand it, but often had to scan multiple areas of the interface before finding the information they needed. This suggested the issue was not lack of interest, but information clarity.
Rider Surveys
We conducted rider surveys across multiple markets to evaluate how well riders understood the loyalty program. While most riders recognized the value of the program, many struggled to clearly understand tier progression, benefit eligibility, and what actions were required to reach the next tier. The results indicated that improving benefit visibility and progress clarity would play a key role in increasing rider motivation and engagement with the program.
First Iterations
By this stage we had gathered signals from multiple sources as mentioned above. Together, these inputs revealed a consistent pattern:
Riders were able to interact with the loyalty program, but often struggled to clearly understand how it worked.
In particular, riders had difficulty quickly answering a few core questions (Illustrate?):
What tier am I currently in?
How far am I from the next tier?
Which benefits do I already have?
Do I need to claim rewards or are they already active?
When exactly do benefits expire?
Rather than treating these as isolated UI problems, we reframed the challenge as an information clarity problem. The goal of the next design iteration was to make the structure of the loyalty program immediately legible to riders.
To explore this direction, we worked on the first iterations that focused on three principles:
Progression should always be visible
So riders immediately understand their current status and next milestone
Showcase benefits upfront
So riders understand clearly the benefits they have achieved, and where to find them. Previously it was too hidden.
Show clear tier progression overview
So the relationship between tiers and benefits becomes easier to scan, and riders can clearly see their overall progress and upcoming paths.
Because the loyalty program is used by riders across many markets, it was important to validate whether the new structure was actually easier to understand. To do this, we ran usability testing on the prototype before moving forward with the final redesign.
Usability Testing
To evaluate the redesign direction, we ran a structured usability test in Maze. The study included riders from Poland and was conducted in English and Polish. Participants completed 11 tasks covering the full loyalty journey. The tasks included:
Understanding tier progression
Identifying unlocked benefits
Discovering benefit details
Claiming rewards
Interpreting benefit validity
One of the most interesting outcomes of the study was that many tasks were successfully completed by Riders without any major issues, signaling the new design proposal is strong. But there are still couple of problems worth highlighting to improve:
Progression was clear and motivating
Riders had no trouble understanding tier progression. They could quickly identify: how many deliveries were required, which tier came next, and how far they were from unlocking it.
The highlighted benefits works, but the layout doesn't
Riders know where to find their benefits (some even think it’s the tiers progress details page because that was the page that was shown in the previous tasks).
Based of the heatmap, aside from the tiers progress details page CTA, they mostly click around on the benefit section before succeeding the task by clicking “see all benefits” CTA at the very bottom.
This indicates that riders already know that there’s a benefit section that exists, but the entry point to the whole benefit list still lacks visibility / awareness because of how it's buried under the entire list.
Tier progression and included benefits become misleading
Riders understood that the progress bar is indicating their progression, but due to how the information is grouped, it somehow feels that they have not achieved the benefits yet for the achieved tiers because the progress bar didn't pass through, which is misleading, because once they achieve the tier they have unlocked the entire benefit for that tier, the progress is just to indicate that they are heading towards the next tier, but some riders still don't understand this.
Designing the new experience
The redesign focused on improving clarity of structure, not adding more UI. The key question was: How do we make the loyalty system legible in seconds?
Loyalty Home Page
The loyalty home screen was redesigned to immediately answer the three most important rider questions:
Where am I now?
How far am I from the next tier?
What benefits do I currently have?
New home page design
The top section now clearly surfaces:
current tier
progress bar
deliveries remaining to next tier
campaign end date
Below that, the Your Benefits section shows unlocked benefits in a horizontal scroll layout.
This keeps the section compact while making the See All Benefits entry point more visible.
Tier Progress
The previous design used a long vertical list of tiers. In testing, this made riders scroll through a long page and sometimes interpret tiers as sequential rewards rather than distinct levels.
We improved by using the horizontal tier cards approach where each card now clearly represents:
The Tier
Delivery requirements
Included benefits
And tags to indicate the rider's current rider status
This makes tier comparison faster and removes unnecessary scrolling.
New tier card states screen + cards overflowing
Benefit List
Interestingly, not everything needed redesigning. Usability testing showed that the benefit list itself already worked well. Riders understood that benefit cards were interactive and claim actions were easy to find. Instead of redesigning stable patterns, we chose to keep this interaction model intact.
Benefit list page
Results & Early Signals
Engagement signals after the first loyalty update
Before the full redesign described in this case study, the loyalty experience had already gone through an earlier iteration following the Glovo migration, which is described above as V3. This iteration focused primarily on aligning the interface with Delivery Hero’s design system and resolving smaller usability issues.
[add data if possible]
After this update was rolled out, we analyzed rider engagement trends across multiple markets using retention datasets. Across the observed markets, the data showed positive retention trends:
Average 8-week rider retention improvement ≈ +54%
Highest observed improvement ≈ +100%
Lowest observed improvement ≈ +11%
While this analysis was not conducted as a controlled experiment, the results suggested that improvements to the loyalty program experience were associated with stronger rider engagement across several regions.Given the scale of Delivery Hero’s marketplace, even modest improvements in rider retention can translate into meaningful impact across millions of deliveries.
Why a deeper redesign was still needed
Despite these positive engagement signals, feedback from regional teams and rider research indicated that the experience still had significant clarity issues.
Riders were able to interact with the loyalty program, but often struggled to quickly understand:
which benefits were active
which rewards required claiming
how tiers related to benefits
how benefit validity related to loyalty cycle dates
This meant that while the program was functioning, the motivational loop of the loyalty system was not as strong as it could be. The redesign presented in this case study focused on addressing these structural clarity issues.
The final redesign
The redesigned loyalty experience has now been implemented and rolled out by engineering. The new design improves:
Visibility of rider progression
Clarity of tier structure
Discoverability of benefits
Understanding of benefit states and validity
Because the redesign has only recently been implemented, long-term behavioral impact is still being evaluated. However, the new structure aims to strengthen the core loyalty loop by making the system easier for riders to understand and engage with.