What would make employees use the app?
Livd needed to understand how people experienced employee benefits, rewards, and corporate discounts before deciding what to build.
We wanted to learn what motivated employees to use these programs, what made an offer worthwhile, and what would discourage them from engaging.
The goal was to define an MVP around real user needs rather than assumptions about what a benefits app should include.
Understanding what matters to employees
The competitive review helped us understand the existing range of benefits and reward experiences. But knowing what platforms offered didn't tell us what employees would actually find useful.
We explored that question through one-on-one interviews, looking at what made benefits relevant, worthwhile, and easy enough to use.
Questions covered what employees already used, what they valued, how they preferred to be recognized, and what would make a benefits app useful enough to return to.
4 Themes emerged
I collaborated with the team to organize interview findings through affinity mapping in FigJam. We grouped recurring observations into four themes.
Together, these themes helped the team move from individual interview comments to broader product opportunities.
Themes generated from interviews
From insights to MVP priorities
We used the research findings to inform a team brainstorming and prioritization session. The goal was to balance impact and effort and avoid building too much before validating the core experience.
This prioritization gave the team a clearer starting point: make it easy for employees to discover relevant offers and redeem their points before investing in additional engagement features.
SHOULD HAVE
COULD HAVE
WONT HAVE
Outcome
The research gave the team a clearer understanding of what employees valued and helped shape a more focused MVP. Rather than treating every possible feature as equally important, we used the themes from the interviews to guide early product decisions.
The findings were then translated into product design, and the team built and launched the first version of the app.
