Case study — Designing referral program for a Music Ed-Tech platform

Published in

UX Planet

8 min readDec 2, 2020

Welcome to a new case study. In this, I’m going to share insights on the design decisions I made while designing a referral flow for an Ed-Tech platform for all music learners called The Music Masterclass.

To design a referral program for The Music Masterclass App that let's most engaged or active users invite their friends and increase the app's user base without spending money on marketing.

Background context

There are two types of users- Paid (premium) and Free.

As a Free user, you have access to all unpaid courses on the platform which you can complete at your own pace and these are pre-recorded lessons.
As a Premium member, you have all the benefits of free users as well as you get access to the live courses with an exact timeline(Specific start and end date).

I had very less idea of how referrals in a product work so I thought of researching about it.

I explored and read a bunch of articles to know

How referral flows work in an app?
What is the design thinking that goes behind it?
How other products do it?
What are different types of incentives?
How to make a successful referral flow?

Incentive is the key part of a product referral design.

Referrals if included in a product with the right incentives on both sides including referrer and referee helps in making a flywheel of growth.
Referrals are mostly done by the users who are happy and regularly engage with your content or product, so that you don’t have to spend money on marketing to get new users but your satisfied users invite their friends and family to the platform themselves.
The flow can be embedded anywhere in the product but I have to keep in mind that it should be at a point where it has maximum likelihood of conversion and also is a moment that happens frequently.

I also found some amazing data while exploring

People are 4 times more likely to buy when referred by a friend — Nielsen

83% of consumers say they either completely or somewhat trust recommendations from family, colleagues, and friends about products — Nielsen

Referrals can be majorly categorized into 2 categories —

Incentivized referrals — Referrer usually shares a unique referral code/link. This unique referral code helps in tracking where the new users came from so that we can provide incentives accordingly.

Non-incentivized referrals — Word of mouth, or social share, or recommendation.

There are four kind of incentives offered in referrals

Discounted products- Uber- discount on rides, AirBnB- Travel credit- can be used while booking, E-Com- amazon and Flipkart- gift cards and discount on future orders
Premium access to the product for a period- Evernote offers premium account access for a limited period.
Increased usage limit of the product- eg Dropbox
Money- some products offer you referral money. This often happens with one-time, transactional products.

I then collected screenshots of referral flows of several apps and observed how do they do it?

I broke down their referral flows into consumable information

Wireframes and Ideation

I thought of different ideas on how can I create incentives on both sides and where I can embed the flow-

I figured out some points in the user journey at which the user is highly motivated and has a high psyche level, so that they are most likely to make the refer the product to others(friends, family, colleagues).

But how exactly referral flow work in this app?

I have explained each point in the user journey with the visuals and design thinking behind each case —

1. When a user leaves a good rating(4 or 5 ) on a course!

If learner leaves a good rating it implies they are really happy with the course content and overall experience.
This is one of the points where they are more likely to refer it to their friend.
When a user leaves a good rating, this pop-up comes which asks the user to invite their friend.
This is in both cases either you are a paid/premium user or a free user.
I wanted to clearly state the benefits of inviting your friend and also used social proof to help users build trust in the product and then asking them to perform a certain action.

I used social proof because-

Social proof is a convenient shortcut that users take to determine how to behave. When they are unsure or when the situation is ambiguous, they are most likely to look and accept the actions of others as correct.
The greater the number of people, the more appropriate the action seems.

2. When the user completes a session gets leveled up!

In this case, they receive a badge/reward, so they have a high psyche level and are highly motivated as well.
Timing is everything, especially when you want something from your users.
The best moment to do so is when the users achieved their goal and feel like they got superpowers from your product.
Use this moment carefully to ask for key elements of feedback or actions that can make your business grow.
But in this case, the pop-up referral screen is different for premium and free users.

Paid User

Design thinking around pop screen for paid/premium user

For paid users I added this feature where each time they level up, they can send out a 30-Day premium guest pass to their friends.
Sending out invite links is boring and therefore I wanted to make the experience delightful.
Sending out a 30-Day guest pass makes sense because it doesn’t feel like a trial, but feels like the user is giving out a gift card. Also, it's enough time to build the habit for the product.
You can clearly go through the benefits of sending out gift cards, it is based on the idea that both referrer and referee should be incentivized so that growth is more exponential.

Free user

Free users don’t have the option to send out guest passes, they can only invite their friends through their referral links.
The clear benefits of inviting friends are well explained in the visual design.

3. When the user completes a course!

Gives a feeling of reaching a milestone.
App rewards user with extra points when the user completes a course to add on to that feeling of achieving the goal.

When Referee click on the link shared by Referrer

When the referred user receives a pass with the link, it opens up in the browser asking the user to download the app, here I can take the user directly into the app content screen using deep linking to directly show the value to the user without prompting them to sign up.
When they watch their first lesson, it is then they will be asked to sign up in order to track their progress and be a part of leaderboards and earn batches(gamification).

When Referee sign up after using the 30-Day Guest pass from the Referrer

Wait there’s something more!

Felt good right?, Exactly that is how users feel when they are rewarded with unexpected and variable gifts.

So, the platform Music Masterclass identifies the user behavior and learns the patterns in their usage of the platform, and rewards users with small Variable rewards on different occasions.

Thinking around Variable rewards-

Rewards feel best when they are unexpected, however small they may be.
In this case, Usually, users get 500 XPs when someone joins through their invite link, but here they get 1000 XPs (limited for 24 hr and single time use).

“Random“ rewards make powerful motivators; they seem scarce and unpredictable. We’re more motivated to reach a goal with an uncertain reward.

Learning and insights

Gained a lot of insights into how to design keeping in mind about the growth of the product.
I came across various psychology concepts that goes behind designing a referral flow.
I learned about all the motivations that can drive users to refer the product to their friends.
Always try to give the value first and then ask users to do a specific action.
Adding delight in the design makes the user experience far better and engaging.
Considering edge cases is important and forces you to think in-depth about the product.