Barclaycard Freedom Prototype for Focus Group Testing
Barclaycard Freedom is Barclaycard’s credit card rewards and loyalty programme in which cardholders earn and redeem Reward Money at participating retailers. During the development of the Barclaycard Freedom product offering the Hyperlab team were asked to rapidly prototype the solution they were having developed such that they could perform focus group testing in order to validate the user experience and branding associated with the Freedom product. We developed a working electronic point of sale (ePOS) system that would allow items to be scanned using a barcode scanner. Purchases could then be made using either Chip-and-PIN credit cards via a Chip-and-PIN payment terminal or with contactless payment technology using either a contactless credit card or an NFC mobile handset. The ePOS system produced receipts for the transactions with messages and details as appropriate to the Freedom product offering.
Over the course of the project our iterative SDL allowed the Barclaycard Freedom team to tweak and modify the consumer experience with feedback from team members (who had never seen a physical representation of the product before) and potential users. The rapid development and flexibility were key to enabling the development of a more user centric product within the timescales required so as not to impact the ongoing product development already underway.
