Nando's Rewards, Missions
How I led the design of a new loyalty mechanic to 1.39m customers in two weeks
Project Overview
Web designs courtesy of Edwin Yuen.
PROBLEM
Rising menu prices made it even longer for regular customers to earn Rewards
Business context
It's now taking customers longer to accrue Rewards due to menu increases over the last few years.
Less frequent users may now have to wait nearly 3 years to earn a Red Reward.
The strategic bet
An external agency was commissioned to test out some ideas to leverage Nando's Rewards and to look at new features which could mitigate rising menu prices.
Missions outperformed the alternatives on projected revenue per quarter. Missions it is.
What are Missions?
Phase 1 Missions are in-app and web challenges to purchase specific items to gain a bonus Chilli. Chillies = Rewards. Rewards = free food.
CONSTRAINTS
Two weeks - Ship fast, and learn
01
Two week deadline for full experience
Locked in with board commitments to the owners
02
No user testing in scope for phase 1
Decisions were based on collaborative craft and reasoning
CUTTING ROOM
What didn't ship and why
Success animations
My initial thinking was to make it fun and give users a delighter upon completion of a Mission.
I cut this as it would have interfered with Order Again revenue in the post-order page.
Missions visual identity
My goal was to create a VI that was playful and fun, focusing on geometric patterns, shapes, and our Rewards colours. I had to deprioritise this to finish everything else for the 2 week deadline.
This exploration was the catalyst for a complete overhaul of the Nando's Rewards visual identity - briefed for FY28.
DECISIONS
01
Design for future phases, ship for phase 1
Outcome
A dashboard system to handle multiple Missions for first release. Multiple Missions will be live for phase 3.
I built the case to include this in phase 1 as it will remove future tech debt, and allow users to learn about Missions before being thrown into one.
Constraint
Two weeks to ship, and a fair bit of convincing. Shipping the MVP structure would have created a redesign project within months when multiple Missions launched.
Decision
Designed the future state first - dashboard list with a count, tab for completed Missions, cards designed to scale from one to multiple.
Designed a CMS-template for image overhang - brand liked the image overlap but engineering flagged unpredictable placement from the CMS.
The template constrains positioning enough to ship the overhang in phase 2. Everyone's happy.
Got engineering buy-in early - walked the leads through the future state in the first technical review. Build cost turned out to be minimal in the end.
02
Integrate the celebration into the order flow, not redirect to it
Outcome
Two forms of positive feedback in during the ordering journey - Checkout banner and Mission Complete banner in the POP page.
Constraint
Post-order drives high re-order revenue through the Order Again CTA. Redirecting from the POP would be fun, but it would hide Order Again - costing Nando's significant revenue per order.
Decision
Held Mission Complete inline - pre-checkout banner and a static Mission Complete card on the post-order page. No redirect, no animation.
Preserved the existing re-order happy path - Taking users away from post-order to Missions dashboard severely disrupted order again revenue, and doesn't give them a route back into their order. Not worth the animation.
Raised the trade-off in technical review - mentioned the potential cost of the deep-link option. The room agreed: system over feature.
03
Built for the app's future, not its present
Outcome
A PERi-verse-native set of UI components for the Missions surface, built in partnership with our wonderful React Native engineer, Arron. When the app design system catches up, Missions is already ahead of it.
Constraint
Nando's design system can't run inside the React Native app. Standard components were available, but they didn't fit with the web designs, nor Nando's new visual identity.
Do we use current components, only to rebuild at a later date when the app is redesigned? Or do we do the work now to save a redesign down the road?
Decision
Built the PERi-verse natively - specific tokens, typography scales, image ratios. Designed to feel like the brand, now.
Paired with the app engineer throughout - Every component co-built, and I leaned on him massively during this. He answered all of my dumb questions.
Treated the work as forward-investment - When the app redesign happens, Missions won't need rebuilding to match.
IMPACT
Not the results we were expecting, for now
Behind the numbers
Although quarterly revenue is up generously, it's still significantly less than the projected numbers.
Current Missions completion rate on average is 1.4%.
The cohort split
Active customers converted at 1.7%
Customers lapsed 12-18 months converted at 0.2%.
An 8.5x gap on the same mechanic, comms, and offer. Lapsed customers aren't engaging with the brand.
What phase 2 does with it
Phase 2, which I'll lead on design, starts in H2. The brief moves away from purely transactional missions to brand-led moments - take a selfie at five Nando's. Show us.
Lapsed customers need a reason more than food to care about us.
REFLECTION
Three things I've learnt
We overestimated the ability of Rewards and food alone to reactivate lapsed customers.
Although highlighting new menu items and getting active customers closer to Rewards is enough to get them to spend their money, inactive customers have for whatever reason fallen out of love with Nando's.
As the data shows, giving them free food faster won't reignite the love for them. There has to be another way to bridge that emotional gap.
Future phases will have to test brand participation rather than transactional-based incentives.
This is the big driver for phase 2. Can we engage lapsed users through brand-love Missions? Work starts on this in Q3.
Continue praying to the demo gods before a big presentation.
Praise be they heard my prayers, and when I showed the final prototype to the CMO and Head of Digital Product, everything worked swimmingly.
What's next?
As the results are not what we expected, Phase 2 will be brought forward earlier than expected - in Q3.
As of 12th June 2026 Missions x Extra Hot Takes launched, which is where users can bet on outcomes of games during the World Cup.
