My role
Product Designer
Team
Product, Growth, Data, Android Engineering, Backend Engineering
Timeframe
Content
Timeframe
Content
Introduction
Similarweb acquired Embee to expand its ability to collect large-scale, opt-in mobile behavioral data through a consumer rewards app.
After rebranding it as BrandBee, the product struggled to maintain clarity and engagement, and the experience no longer effectively guided users from first open to repeated earning and data contribution.
The Challenge
BrandBee needed to improve a negative ROI while also retaining users who contributed opt-in behavioral mobile data to Similarweb’s intelligence platform.
At the time, the product had roughly 2,000 DAU, D1 retention was 28%, and user acquisition cost was around $3 per user.
The challenge was not only to redesign the interface. It was to help users understand how to earn, feel progress faster, and return often enough for the product to create business value.
Research
The work was driven by behavioral analytics, funnel observation, competitive research, and user feedback.
We looked closely at the new-user journey: where users landed, which actions they started, where they dropped, and how quickly they reached a meaningful earning moment. The key question was not only whether users completed onboarding, but whether they understood the value of the product quickly enough to continue.
User feedback also revealed the emotional challenge of rewards apps: trust. Users needed to believe the app was legitimate, that offers were worth their time, and that effort would lead to real value.
Competitive research helped identify useful patterns: visible balances, payout progress, recommended actions, daily bonuses, quick wins, fallback options, and reward feedback.
Design Process
The main design shift was to treat BrandBee less as a collection of earning features and more as an earning system.
The Earn page became the main growth surface. It needed to support offer discovery, prioritization, task framing, progress, and re-engagement.
A key structural change was the navigation. The original navigation reflected internal categories: Home, Surveys, Rewards, Shopping. I shifted it toward user intent: Earn, Cashout, Save, Account.
This moved the product language away from what the company offered and toward what the user came to do.
Solution
The redesigned experience created a clearer earning loop:
Land on Earn.
Understand the available paths.
Start with a low-friction or recommended action.
Complete an offer or task.
See progress.
Continue to the next action or return later.
The solution included a clearer Earn page structure, visible balance and payout progress, daily bonus and quick-win mechanics, scalable offer cards, clearer microcopy, post-completion nudges, fallback options when surveys were unavailable, and a navigation model that could support more earning types over time.
The goal was to make BrandBee feel less like browsing a catalog and more like following an earning path.
Impact
The redesign supported BrandBee’s core growth goals: activation, early engagement, daily active usage, retention, offer completion, revenue per user, and lower drop-off after onboarding.
For new users, the work reduced confusion and increased early momentum. For the business, it created a more scalable surface for introducing, prioritizing, and testing different earning opportunities.
The broader shift was from a passive rewards catalog to a more intentional engagement system — one that gave users clearer actions and faster feedback, while giving the business a stronger framework for growth experiments.