- Bemol Digital
- Senior Product Designer
- Product Design · Research
- Bemol App
- Launched · 2024
What changed
Three months after launch, measured against the same period before.
- +170%
- Loans section usage
- +153%
- Store credit usage
- +126%
- My Account and Bonus History
Before, a list with no hierarchy. After, what matters comes first.
A drawer, not a screen
Profile had accumulated features for years without anyone deciding what belonged there. Orders, credit, bonus points, loans and settings sat side by side with equal weight, in an order nobody had chosen.
The result was that high-value features (the ones the business most wanted used) were as buried as the ones almost nobody opened.
Three problems, named separately
Every item had the same visual weight
Purchase tracking and account settings were presented identically. With nothing to signal importance, the list read as a wall and people scanned rather than navigated.
Financial features were invisible where they mattered
Crediário, bonus points and loans are the products that make Bemol different from a generic retailer. In the profile they were indistinguishable from a settings entry.
Nobody agreed on what mattered most
Different teams had different mental models of the hierarchy. Without a shared ordering, any redesign would just be one opinion replacing another.
Settling the hierarchy with evidence
Card sorting was the piece that ended the argument.
Four artefacts, in order. Each one answers a question the previous one left open.
Management, QA, engineering, logistics, trade marketing and support. They surfaced how differently each area read the same screen.
Turned opinion into a ranking that could be defended. It replaced "I think orders should come first" with a result everyone had participated in producing.
Showed which conventions customers already carried in before they got here.
Checked the ranking against reality, before it became production.
Test evidence, annotated: the findings that adjusted the final hierarchy.
Card sorting didn't tell me the right order. It told six people who disagreed that they had produced one together.
The product that most differentiates Bemol, no longer indistinguishable from settings.
What didn't ship
Ordering the profile by individual usage
Personalising per customer would have made the screen unlearnable: the item you used yesterday moves tomorrow. We ordered by aggregate behaviour and kept the position stable.
Merging bonus points and store credit
They look similar and behave differently. Combining them tested badly: people expected one balance and found two rule sets.
Who did what
- Interview script and facilitation of all six sessions
- Card sorting design and analysis of the resulting hierarchy
- Information architecture and visual hierarchy of the new profile
- Usability test script and post-launch measurement plan
- Usage data extraction, with the analytics team
- Implementation, with the core app team
- Prioritisation of which features to highlight, with product
Reflections
The redesign changed almost nothing visually.
No new component shipped with this. What moved the numbers was ordering and weight: deciding what comes first and what gets emphasis.
That's also why the result generalises: the +170% on loans wasn't about loans. It was about a feature finally being where people were already looking.