Challenge
Digitizing a Multimillion-Dollar Legacy System
For years, a high-end regional grocery retailer ran a high-touch coupons 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. In-store shoppers had to carry physical coupons to redeem and online shoppers had to keep track of their physical/email coupon and manually enter promo codes at 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.
Strategy
Initial Concept
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. Roughly 80% of our customers were in-store shoppers, I wanted the path to redemption for these shoppers to be simple and unambiguous. There are 2 paths for redemption: persistent in the home page header and in the coupon navigation. I designed a "Redeem In-Store" Floating Action Button that replaced the standard cart button on the coupon page. Since the page was focused on savings discovery and clipping rather than add to cart actions, the FAB prioritized the most relevant user goal: getting to the register with confidence. For online checkout, saved coupons were automatically applied, eliminating manual code entry entirely.
Identifying Post-Action Friction
We launched an internal pilot to validate the technical foundation and basic user flow. While the in-store clip-and-scan flow tested well, the pilot exposed a transparency gap in the online experience: users were unsure whether clipped coupons required additional steps at cart and checkout. This uncertainty was undermining confidence in the automated system before users even reached checkout.
Evolving the Concept: 3 Step Flow
I evolved the design into a structured three-step process, creating guardrails that guided users from discovery to confirmed savings:
1
Intent (Add)
A frictionless “click and add” interaction that instantly links the coupon to the user’s account.
2
Validation (Shop Eligible Items)
A direct "Shop Eligible Items" CTA that brought transparency to exactly which products and their variants qualified, reducing the risk of a user reaching checkout with ineligible items.
3
Confirmation (Savings Applied)
For online shoppers, immediate confirmation that the discount had been applied, removing any residual doubt before checkout.
Validation
I built high-fidelity prototypes of this model to support user testing across both in-store and online scenarios. Feedback confirmed that the additional steps didn't add friction — they added certainty.
"I would've wanted to know which ones apply—whether I'm in store or I'm shopping online. I may end up going to the wrong store and then picking up the wrong tortillas and thinking they apply just because I couldn't see the details." — Participant
“There was no promo code I had to type. I did not have to manually do anything. I just had to click on coupons, find the tortillas I wanted, and they were free. Everything was automatically done in the app.” — Participant
Results & Impact
15,000
Coupons redeemed within the first 2 weeks across 10 stores
150%
Increase in active app users
3x
Growth in weekly app downloads