Allē Flash

Project Background

Length: 10 Months

My Role: Senior Product Designer

Platforms: Native iOS and Android

Platform: Allē is a rewards program built around influencing patient behavior. A good comparison would be CVS Extra Care or United MileagePlus, but for medical aesthetics treatments like BOTOX® Cosmetic or CoolSculpting. Allergan (the company behind Allē) believes that rewarding patients for their loyalty and creating a deeper relationship between the products and the patients who use them will ultimately lead to more sales down the road.

Overview

Allē Flash is a feature designed to influence patient treatment decisions at the point of care. When patients arrive at a med spa or dermatologist's office, they scan a QR code typically placed at the front desk. This triggers an algorithm that personalizes limited-time offers based on the location’s inventory and the patient’s treatment history—only surfacing products they’ve never tried or haven’t tried in a while. If the patient redeems the offer, Allē captures the associated revenue, creating a surprise and delight moment for the patient and another opportunity to convert for the provider. Because of the sensitive nature of working on such a revenue impactful product, much of my work is viewed under a microscope by stakeholders across the company. My work with Flash is not only an exercise in solving difficult design problems with real stakes but also in negotiation and stakeholder management.

Today, Flash is Allergan Data Lab’s most successful product. It accounts for ~$110M/yr in revenue, 90% of all the revenue brought in by ADL.

How Flash works today:

Scan Flash Button

We had been hearing from our field reps that Flash was working inconsistently for patients. In particular, they had noticed problems when patients had to download the app first before scanning and when they were in poor network conditions, such as if their office was underground or in a crowded office building. After some investigation, we discovered this was due to an issue with the way we implemented the partnership we have with Branch.io. This is the service that allows us to create a unique QR code for each practice and tie that to the Flash backend (called the Flash Recommendation Service, or FRS).

 

Problem

Users were receiving vague error messages after scanning a Flash QR code.

After researching why this was happening, we discovered that Branch.io was often losing the context of what users were tying to accomplish after they scanned the QR code. This would result in the app dropping users directly on Home without actually delivering their offer. When combined over millions of users, this amounted to hundreds of thousands in lost revenue.

 

Solution

When these errors occurred, our new design sent users to an in app QR code scanner.

My design solution was to create an in app QR code scanner and show an error message that prompted users to “scan again” if we detect a Branch.io irregularity. You can see this design here.

We also including a new Floating Action Button the Wallet screen, and encouraged our practices to tell patients to scan via that entry point instead of their camera app. The camera app would still work, just this method would be pitched by practices as more reliable.

 
 

Business Impact

From this change alone the team and I were able to save an estimated 2,000 scans per month from dropping off. This is in the ballpark of $90,000/month in attributable revenue we were able to recover from this idea.

Here you can see our tracking metrics from MixPanel we implemented to see how the feature was preforming.

Points Based Offers

In 2025, Flash underwent a budget cut of around 35%. This means that we either had to give out fewer offers or the offers would have to be worth less money. While technically a random chance, Flash was built to have an offer success rate (the percent of users that win an offer once they scan) of 97%. With these budget cuts, that number was predicted to drop down to ~70%.

My challenge for this project was to ideate ways to make this less painful for patients and practices alike.

Background on Allē points
Allē points can be redeemed on any Allē product purchased at a providers office. This could be anything from BOTOX® Cosmetic, to our skin care line SkinMedica, to our body contouring product CoolSculpting. Providers take the equivalent amount of dollars off a patients final checkout amount, and later bill Allergan for the discount they just gave. Allergan then removes those points from a patients account.

 

Solution

The solution we came up with was Points based offers, or “get treated with BOTOX® Cosmetic during todays visit and earn double points”. This made sense for a few reasons:

  1. Points cost less due to lack of redemption. We know from our own internal data that only 70% of points are ever redeemed before they expire, giving us an easy 30% savings.

  2. Points always take ~48 hrs to post to patients account for fraud reasons. This means that we would be able to incentive patients today, without having to pay out this benefit until their next visit, if they have one. This kicks the problem down the road for us an average of 3 - 4 months, making our budget last much longer.

 

This is the design that was handed to development. We built upon the already established design language of the Wallet cards to make it intuitive to patients they won an offer that can be redeemed for Cash. We launched with 3 offer types across 6 products:

Business Impact

These offers are launching in July and our the key way we plan to remedy this budget deficit. We expect these offer types to allow us to reduce our promotional budget (the amount of money we give directly to patients in the form of offers and points) from $26M/yr to $21M/yr. These offer types also allow us to increase the percent of users who win an offer, from 70% up to 90%.

Flash Authentication

For many patients, Flash is the first touchpoint they have with Allē. Providers often use it as a way to encourage users to sign up for Allē as they know Allē customers have a more significant lifetime value. However, when examining our registration data, we noticed a concerning trend:

 

Problem

This was a recording of registration before we made any changes. We found that many users would drop off during this process and Allē would lose the opportunity to deliver them a Flash offer. Average registration time across Allē is 15-20 seconds.

 

Solution

Our solution was a slight change to registration that connected the process with the reward they are expecting to receive. With the simple addition of the banner at the top of patients screens, we were able to successfully keep users motivated. This small change resulted in a higher registration completion rate and Flash offer delivery rate, both important metrics to the company.

 

The design we choose to go with mirrored the visual language of the wallet screens. This would further reinforce the understanding with users that Flash offers = valuable savings they can spend.

Business Impact

The results from this project were substantial. We were able to increase successful registrations via Flash from 89% to 93%, resulting in an estimated revenue recovery of ~$150,000 per month. Numbers are per year.