Buddies by Blue Buffalo

A loyalty app most people forgot they had.

Buddies rewards pet parents for buying Blue Buffalo food. When I joined as the first in-house Design Lead, it worked, but it was a transactional utility people opened, used once, and forgot.

I led the product design end to end and rebuilt the experience around the one loop that creates value: earn a reward, feel rewarded, come back. I owned strategy, information architecture, interaction and visual design, prototyping, and usability testing, and I built the design system and mentored a team of three other designers so we could ship quickly without losing quality.

The redesign nearly quadrupled active users, lifted store ratings to near the top of the category, and earned the team a 2023 Gold Stevie Award and recognition from Loyalty360.

The value was real. The habit was not.

Blue Buffalo had a loyal customer base and a generous rewards program, but the app that delivered it was underused. People signed up, claimed a reward, and drifted away. Engagement was flat and the team had little visibility into why.

The most telling number came out of early research: 42% of users did not know the receipt and QR rewards existed at all. The core value of the product was effectively hidden. That reframed the project for me. This was not a visual refresh. It was a behavior-change problem, and the job was to make earning feel obvious, instant, and worth coming back for.

A pile-up of friction around the one flow that mattered.

Earning a reward meant proving a purchase, almost always by scanning a paper receipt. That flow was the heart of the product, and it was also where people gave up most. Around it sat a set of compounding constraints:

Three rules I designed against.

To keep a small team aligned and decisions defensible, I set three principles up front. Every major call traces back to one of them.

Growth backed by evidence, not hope.

I ran a mixed-method program so the roadmap was grounded in behavior, not guesses. I mined thousands of store reviews for recurring language, ran interviews with pet parents across the loyalty spectrum, and worked with analytics to map the real earn funnel end to end.

Triangulating those sources produced a clear, shared picture of who we were building for and where the loop broke. I translated that into three decision-making personas and a reprioritized roadmap that put the earn loop, not new features, at the center.

That insight changed where the team spent its energy. Instead of adding reward types, we invested in surfacing the ones we already had and in making the act of earning effortless.

Receipt scanning, rebuilt end to end.

The single-screen scan was the highest-leverage fix in the product. It asked people to capture, align, crop, and submit a photo of a paper receipt all at once, then wait on an OCR engine that sometimes failed silently. A third of attempts never finished.

I prototyped two directions and tested them against each other with real receipts and real users.

The extra step looked like added friction on paper, but in practice it removed the anxiety that was actually causing drop-off. Splitting the flow into capture, confirm, and reward let me design honest feedback for the Microblink OCR step, so people knew their receipt was being read rather than wondering if the app had frozen.

Putting the reward where people already look.

Fixing the flow only helps people who reach it. To solve the 42% who never found rewards, I rebuilt the home experience around the earn loop. Earning moved to the first thing you see, progress became visible and motivating, and rewards surfaced contextually instead of hiding behind a menu.

I also leaned into the companion principle, adding lightweight social proof and group moments that made the app feel like part of caring for a pet rather than a checkout step. Each change reinforced the loop: see a reason to earn, earn easily, feel rewarded, return.

A design system and a team that could keep up.

Sustained growth needed more than good screens. I built the Buddies design system in Figma, a documented component library shared across iOS and Android, so the four of us could design consistently and hand off cleanly. Standardizing components and specs cut design-to-engineering handoff time by roughly 50%.

As the first in-house Design Lead, I also set how the team worked: running design critiques, pairing designers to features, and building a shared review rhythm with the PM and engineering. The system was as much about people and process as it was about tokens and components.

Loved by users, recognized by the industry.

The redesign moved the numbers that mattered and the ones leadership felt. Active users grew from 210K to 810K. Store ratings climbed from 4.7 to 4.9 on iOS and 4.8 on Android. Thirty-day retention rose 73%, and active users became 2.3x more likely to return month over month.

The work was recognized beyond the team, earning a 2023 Gold Stevie Award and recognition from Loyalty360 for customer loyalty design.

What I took from it.