• Rewards were only accessible to logged-in account holders
• Guest checkouts made up 70% of most merchants' shoppers
• Express checkout adoption was accelerating the drop-off
• Merchants lacked tools to reward or retain guest shoppers

• End-to-end UX from concept through handoff
• Merchant-facing settings and opt-in flow
• Shopper-facing guest state UI and email communication design
• User testing and iteration based on findings
• Final specs and developer handoff

Opt-in for merchants, not default-on. Turning guest earning on by default for every merchant would have created confusion for programs that weren't set up to handle it. Making it opt-in gave merchants control and let us roll it out to engaged programs first. It also gave us cleaner data on adoption and effectiveness.

Email as the primary communication channel for guest points. Guest shoppers have no account to log into, so points had to be communicated somewhere else. Email was the right call because it works without any new infrastructure and keeps the experience familiar. The tradeoff was accepting that some guests would miss the message entirely.

Keeping the UI surface consistent with the existing rewards panel. Rather than designing a separate guest experience from scratch, we adapted the existing rewards panel to handle the logged-out state. This kept development scope manageable and reduced the learning curve for shoppers already familiar with Smile-powered programs.

Surfacing email prompt friction early rather than at the end of checkout. User testing showed confusion when the email ask appeared too late. Moving the nudge earlier in the flow reduced drop-off and made the point delivery feel expected rather than surprising.

• Merchant opt-in toggle and settings within the Smile admin
• Guest-state rewards panel for logged-out shoppers
• Email prompt and earning nudge at checkout
• Post-checkout point notification via email
• Referral program support for guest customers
• Analytics for merchants to track guest earning performance

Most of the complexity in this feature lived on the backend. Guest earning required new logic for tracking points without an account, tying them to an email address, and making sure they could be claimed later if the shopper eventually signed up.

The design work here was less about screens and more about defining rules. Flow diagrams mapped out how points were assigned, stored, and communicated depending on the shopper's state. Those diagrams were the primary handoff artifact for the engineering team.

Email was the only surface the shopper actually saw. Getting the logic right mattered more than the UI. When to send, what to say, and how to handle edge cases like an email address already tied to an existing account. Mapping those edge cases in advance kept the build clean. Engineering did not need design in the room because the flow diagrams already had it. The merchant-facing side was simpler but still required care. Settings had to be clear enough that merchants could enable the feature confidently without needing support documentation to explain it.

The biggest surprise was how much of the work was really a communication design problem. Getting the UI right was easy. Getting guests to understand what they earned, why their email was needed, and how to access points: that part was harder.

User testing flagged the email prompt as a point of confusion earlier than expected. Shoppers weren't sure if submitting their email was optional or required, and some assumed it was for marketing. Reframing the copy around points specifically (not a general sign-up) made a measurable difference in how people responded to it.