Turning a multimillion-dollar paper program into a single tap

For years, a high-end regional grocery retailer ran a high-touch offers program that depended on significant manual labor, paper printing, and ongoing postage, adding up to millions of dollars annually. The experience for customers was equally fragmented. Shoppers had to carry physical offers in-store or manually enter promo codes at online checkout, two behaviors that introduced friction at exactly the wrong moment.

The goal was clear: migrate the entire program to a digital experience that reduced operational costs while making savings easier to find, clip, and redeem.

I began by designing an experience that prioritized ease of use and automated savings, removing the friction of physical coupon management and manual code entry.

A key early decision was how to surface the redemption barcode in-store. Given that roughly 90% of our customers were in-store shoppers at the time, I wanted the path to redemption to be unambiguous, not something users had to discover. My answer was a "Redeem" Floating Action Button that made the path obvious. In this first concept it sat alongside the app's standard cart button on the coupon page. For online checkout, saved coupons were automatically applied, eliminating manual code entry entirely. At this stage, clipping an offer was a single action: a plus button that added it to the account with one tap.

I partnered with a researcher to run user testing on the initial concept, comparing two layouts: one that kept a cart FAB on the right with the "Redeem" FAB on the left, and one with the redeem FAB alone. The cart FAB caused confusion. Some participants tapped into the cart to hunt for their saved offers, even though those offers were right on the page and behind the redeem FAB. Because the coupon page had no add-to-cart action, nothing confirmed what to do next. Participants couldn't tell whether an offer had actually been applied. The in-store clip-and-scan flow tested well, but online this uncertainty was undermining confidence in the automated system before users ever reached checkout.

User testing pointed to two changes.

The confidence gap didn't call for more steps; it called for more certainty. I added reassurance without adding required actions. Clipping stayed a single tap. An optional "Shop Eligible Items" view let the online shoppers who wanted it shop exactly the products that qualified and see the savings apply, while the roughly 90% shopping in store could ignore it. A passive confirmation then showed the discount had been applied. The user who already knew what to buy still redeemed in one action; the user who was unsure had a way to check. I gave certainty to those who needed it without taxing those who didn't.

The flow took shape in three stages, only the first of them required:

The animation below shows that evolution: the original single tap opening into the three guided steps.

Working with another researcher, I built high-fidelity prototypes of this model to support usability testing across both in-store and online scenarios. The sessions confirmed that the additional steps didn't add friction; they added certainty.

After validation, I concepted a guided version of step two for complex offers — buy one, get two free: walk the shopper through what still needed to be added and show what had just become free. It was the right experience and the wrong scope. When engineering scoped it, building it meant per-offer logic they couldn't take on before launch, so I shipped product groups instead. Every offer shows a "buy" group and a "get free" group, which gives the shopper the same information without the hand-holding.

The digital coupon launch transformed a high-cost physical process into a scalable engagement engine, streamlining checkout and accelerating digital adoption across app and web.