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1. How has the SG Mark benefited you and your team?

Kris+ is Singapore Airlines’ lifestyle rewards app designed to engage customers during their daily lives, even when they do not fly. 

Kris+ combines miles, rewards, discount privileges and payments into a single app; allowing app users and KrisFlyer members to complete payment and earn miles instantly in a single step. 

With over 1,500 dining, retail, and activities partner outlets across Singapore, users are never lacking opportunities to utilise the app. 

Besides transacting at partner outlets, we offer users the highest miles earn rates across a range of lifestyle activities such as purchasing of dining e-vouchers, making dining reservations, and even taxi bookings. By integrating ‘KrisShop’, a premium omnichannel retailer platform by Singapore Airlines, this has brought more ways for our users to continue their inflight and on-the-ground shopping experience. 

Getting awarded the SG Mark is a testament of our team’s hard work and commitment in building such features while designing with users in mind. The award has inspired us to push ourselves further to enhance the Kris+ app experience to better serve our users. 

2. What was the most difficult moment when developing the idea?  

To build the Kris+ lifestyle ecosystem, time-to-market is critical yet challenging. Hence, we formed cross-functional teams to collaborate and innovate such that features are launched in a timely manner. In addition, offerings such as privileges and deals in Kris+ must satisfy our users’ ever-changing preferences. This requires us to source and select not only the right partners who are relevant to our users, but also like-minded ones to work closely with us. 

On the technical front, Kris+ has been an early adopter of blockchain technology. At the stage of idea development, blockchain as an enterprise solution was unheard of as it was typically associated with the crypto market. However, we saw the opportunity that tokenisation is well-suited for miles-based transactions, especially for security and efficiency. 

Hence without any reference, we had to pioneer our way to utilise this capability. Now, Kris+ operates on a private consortium blockchain using Proof of Authority (POA). This also consumes less energy and computing power compared to typical Proof of Work (POW) blockchain transactions which are usually power-hungry.

3. What are some new things your team learned about the users during the process of research and designing? 

When doing research or designing an idea, we try to gather as much user feedback as we can to gauge the usability and underlying pain points. Besides the user experience (UX) aspects, we do see the rise in user expectations towards a well-executed user interface (UI) to support the functionality of the app. 

During the COVID-19 times, digital means were the go-to for daily chores and activities. Now, people have become more digital savvy and are more willing to try out different platforms and technology. This means that we need to be always prepared to access and make changes according to our users’ needs and preferences.  

Furthermore, we have users who are seasoned travellers. As we run on agile, we prioritise feature requirements with different stakeholders and launch it as an MVP. This leads to the question of ‘what does an MVP looks like’ in our context, and how we can satisfy this group of users who are used to the full Singapore Airlines experience which is not the typical experience that MVP delivers. 

4. What are your team’s future plans?  

Besides Singapore, partner discounts and privileges across the world are being progressively added to the Kris+ app. We will continue the expansion of overseas markets where Singapore Airlines has strong user base and presence.  

Ultimately, we will always strive to make the Kris+ app ever relevant to our users, such that it caters to their daily lifestyle needs. 

1. How has the SG Mark benefited you?

SG Mark is organised by Design Business Chamber Singapore (DBCS), and it delivers a strong message on how design make impact on business growth. 

Receiving SG Mark has helped endorsed CaaS brand as design service quality, and design is not just a beautiful face on top of the service, but deeply integrated with service quality.

2. How do you think your design has impacted users?

• Understand park info / plan / buy / app wallet
• Recommended itineraries are designed to helped organisers of the trip to plan ahead for various needs of friends and family (e.g. family with young kid, teenagers, elders)
• For certain rides or entertainment, age, height and physical fitness might be required. We have prompted those information ahead of time to avoid disappoint to the attraction
• Users with time constraints need to get around efficiently for more attractions

Parents need to plan and re-plan spontaneously base on nap time or any other children’s need. Dealing with surprises, e.g. queue is 2-hours long upon arrival

3.  What was the most difficult moment when developing your idea?

The most difficult moment was understand the park guest needs (Empathy for guest / customers ) and translate into design is always challenging.  We have carefully crafted the project plan to ensure the goal can be accomplished:

– Interviewed Ocean Park guests on their trip planning and in-park and
after trip experience ( Before, during and after experience)

– Shadowed various groups of guest to understand their needs, queries
and inconvenient moment when they are visiting the park. Our
researchers spent 2 – 4 hours under sun or rain with each group of the
guest in order to get the essence of their experience.

– We have invited Ocean Park staff members (clients from various
department and level) to come work as one team to participate in
some of the guest interviews , to ensure cross team participate in
the Empathy process.

– A core team is formed to help manage and facilitate the whole design
process to keep cross department in the loop in the digital
transformation of Smart Park experience.

4. What are some new things you learned about yourself and the users as you were designing?

• Ourselves: Empathy Research and service design as part is one of the key elements that helps drive the success of the Digital Design for this project with cross team.  When we first approaching the client with full Design Thinking approach, we were not sure if we can get the senior Directors buy in.  We are happy with the collaboration with Ocean Park in the process.
  
• Guests:  Enjoying good times with friends and family at Ocean Park is the prime of the experience. We carefully design the digital experience to assist the guest to navigate around and provide assistance and it is not the prime itself

4. What are your future plans?

CaaS continues to believe user research and service design are fundamental elements that helps drive the success of the Digital Design.  We will continue to focus on supporting clients in building digital strategies, and provide learning programs to help our clients training their team to deliver exemplify digital experience.

5.  What was the inspiration behind your product/design/idea?

Users need is always the key for design. We cannot stop advocating the importance of looking into both qualitative and quantitative data for digital design. At early stage, we have identified the design should not be measured purely digital about download right, but how well it assist the guests to understand the park experience, plan and assist them to navigate for the best experience as our goal.

6. Did you experience designer’s block during your work process?

Truly integrating the digital experience with Park traveling experience is indeed more complicates than a merely digital business.  Technical challenges with other technical partners occurs and some of the original ideas may not be able to be triaged to future versions.

7. How do you unwind after the grind?

Although we love theme parks, our researcher may want to take a short break before going back to visit again after touring with guest every day for a month. 

1. How has the SG Mark benefited you?

Attaining the SG Mark has been a great encouragement for the team. It acknowledges and validates the rigorous attention and hours we’ve put in and spurs us to continue expanding the possibilities of what design can do. On a personal note, it’s been rewarding to be recognized for a public piece of work — as what we do is sometimes behind the scenes!

2. How do you think your design has impacted users?

One of our goals in revamping the two digital channels was to enable users to make better-informed decisions with ease, as well as provide a more delightful experience. I believe we were able to accomplish that through a combination of visual design and interaction design, resulting in a fresh look on top of recalibrated structures and simpler flows through the platforms. Users should now have less mental load when performing essential account actions, and content prioritizes their needs in context of where they are.

3. What was the most difficult moment when developing your idea?

Creating a new experience for a complex service that has been serving millions while ensuring that it is intuitive and familiar was the biggest challenge for our team. We definitely didn’t nail it on our first try and had many iterations before landing on our final design. It didn’t help that we were doing this project during the peak of the pandemic across multiple time zones and languages!

4. What are some new things you learned about yourself and the users as you were designing?

I became increasingly aware of my biases as a designer. At times, I would apply my own understanding and experience as a telco user to arrive at design decisions. I’ve learnt to constantly check my biases with my teammates and through testing with users to ensure that the final output is universal and accessible.

The process of testing our designs has also made me realise how unpredictable users can be! Some things that seem intuitive to one group might appear inaccessible to others. It’s so important to understand users’ mental models in context.

5. What are your future plans?

I hope to continue deepening my skills and practicing design to serve the needs of people, on projects both big and small!

6. What was the inspiration behind your product/design/idea?

For the website, the team took inspiration from direct competitors as well as indirect competitors (i.e. platforms where people spend the most time every day, such as social media platforms, banking platforms, e-commerce platforms, etc).

For the app, one inspiration was Apple’s Fitness visualizations in the form of rings. Telco packages in Indonesia can get very complex with many granular data categories. The use of the rings helps to elegantly fit more importantinformation about their data usage in one place using a familiar visual concept that can be understood at a glance.

7. Did you experience designer’s block during your work process?

Of course! Balancing user needs, technical feasibility and value for business can be rather challenging and even frustrating at times. Nonetheless, these “boundaries” have pushed our team and myself personally to design more interesting ideas.

8. How do you unwind after the grind?

Drinks after work, working out, and going down many rabbit holes on YouTube.

_{We are so grateful to our amazing team of designers who worked together to create our Life in a Year book and Celebration Kit: Prof. Kris, Xin Yan, Adya, Amanda, Sabrina, Justin, Jeanette, Siska, Angelina, Joyce, Lorraine. A special thanks to our partners, Lien Foundation and Ang Chin Moh Foundation, for their support and contribution to this project.}