Miele makes domestic appliances, and its app is where owners already run them. My work there is subscriptions - a model the company wants to offer, and one its customers increasingly expect from the things they own.
Today a subscription is sold on the website. The app, where the appliance and its owner already are, has no part in it.
Signing up means leaving one journey and starting another. The app knows which machine you own; the website doesn’t, so the person has to say it again.
The entry point is where that costs most. A subscription is a relationship rather than a single order, so somebody lost at the moment of committing isn’t one missed sale - it’s the whole of what would have followed.
The work started with research rather than screens: how owners use the app now, where a subscription would genuinely fit into that, and what makes people hesitate at the point of commitment.
Then testing. Flows go in front of real users before they go into the app, so what reaches the build is what survived contact with someone who doesn’t work on it.
Still in progress. The research and testing are running now, and the subscription flow is being designed alongside them - so there’s no result to report here yet, and nothing has shipped.
