Trained as an architect, I am a product designer with a knack for creating intuitive design solutions that carefully balance the needs of the user, the business, and stakeholders.
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Trained as an architect, I am a product designer with a knack for creating intuitive design solutions that carefully balance the needs of the user, the business, and stakeholders.
Resume
Contact
Regaining Trust in a “Sketchy” Market: Coupon Sites That Actually Work
Coupon sites suck (on purpose), and leave users frustrated. How might we improve the experience and build loyalty?
As the sole product designer on the SEO/Coupons team at Slickdeals, a deal sharing site, one of my biggest projects was redesigning our coupons subdomain, Slickdeals Coupons. Although the redesign was successful (28% lift in extension installs and a 3% lift in transactions), Google updates deeply impacted our SEO game and traffic to our coupon site suffered. In September 2022, I was tasked with creating a new approach to coupons for Slickdeals, one that might be more resilient to Google updates and less reliant on SEO. I served as the sole Product Designer and User Researcher for the project, and also co-led product strategy. I believe the learnings here apply well beyond e-commerce, to any software that would aspire to gain user trust.
The Problem: Why Coupon Sites Suck
If you’ve ever tried to find and use coupons online, odds are you’ve had a negative experience. Here are some of the reasons why:
Misaligned Incentives
Typically, coupon sites earn money by passing the user along to another site, where they earn income from their transaction. However, because the coupon site earns money based on the transaction, not on the coupon’s success, there is limited incentive for the coupon site to provide accurate or helpful deals. In fact, because a coupon reduces the cost of a transaction, a coupon site would theoretically earn more money by not helping the user save money!
Lack of up to Date Information
The vast majority of coupons posted online will not be checked or verified to see if they work, leading to a frustrating user experience. This was one of the main reasons cited by users in our User Research for why they lost faith in coupon sites.
Unclear Redemption Criteria
Some coupons online may work, but require the user to meet various criteria to successfully redeem them, for example, being a first-time customer or hitting a cart minimum. These criteria are often inadequately explained on the coupon sites, leading to more user confusion and frustration.
A Coupon Site That Users Love and Return To: Project Goals and Overview
We had three key goals we wanted to achieve with this project, focusing on leveraging Slickdeals’ existing resources, providing a better coupon experience, and appealing to a new generation of users.
Leverage Slickdeals’ Editor Team to Surface High-Quality, Vetted Coupons
Slickdeals wanted to use the coupon redesign as an opportunity to leverage one of its main advantages compared to competitors: A large workforce of deal and coupon editors, that would be able to help vet and maintain coupon information. This would ensure a better user experience by providing coupons much more likely to work, and with clearer supporting information.
Gain Trust and Users With a Brand-First, Deal-Second Product Strategy
Whereas most coupon sites begin with the product – coupons for X – we wanted to create a page that was valuable enough to a user that they would start there when looking for coupons.
New Coupon Habits for a New Generation
Slickdeals wanted to employ a fresh, modern look to appeal to a new generation of coupon users, Gen-Z, many of whom have never used a physical coupon!
User Research: Getting The Full Story
Research Design
I began by conducting a series of User Interviews with existing Slickdeals coupon users, and collecting survey responses from hundreds of coupon site users (not necessarily Slickdeals) to get a handle on how users in our expanded target demographic thought about coupons, coupon sites, and existing competitors on the market.
Findings
Overwhelming, we found that in both the User Interviews and User Surveys, users had consistent negative experiences with existing coupon sites, and had low trust in the coupons they offered.
Lower Ticket Price = Not Worth My Time
Because so many coupons are expired or invalid, many users, even extreme deal hunters, won’t bother looking for coupons for cheaper items.
Users Want Vetting and Automation
Because the information is so fragmented and constantly changing, users want a hands-off approach to coupons where they are vetted and screened before being surfaced.
It’s More About Any Savings Than It Is About How Much
Surprisingly, many users are not optimizing for saving the absolute most amount possible. Rather, they are more focused on getting some savings–successfully, and without spending too much time on it. This supports the larger observation here, which is that users are wary and fatigued from false or misleading deals. “Once I find a coupon that works, that’s enough for me,” said one user interviewed. “I don’t need to spend more time to max out the savings.”
The Frustration is Real
Almost every user interviewed or surveyed expressed a deep frustration or mistrust of coupon sites, and very little loyalty to a specific site. Even if they have had a positive experience with a coupon site, negative experiences stick with them much more, and much longer, than good ones.
Product Strategy: User-Centric vs. Product Centric
While my role at Slickdeals was primarily that of product designer, I regularly contributed to product strategy alongside various product managers and executives. For this project, I co-led our product strategy along with another product manager.
Based on our goals and research outlined above, we decided that whatever we built would need to focus heavily on regaining users’ trust by focusing heavily on vetted, working coupons. Trust was key, but there were two diverging options in how we would rebuild that trust with users.
Option 1: Product-Centric Coupons
This option would act as a search engine for coupons (pulling from all coupon sites) where a user would enter into the search bar a product URL and we would spit out a list of relevant coupons. The idea would be to ‘catch’ users based on their search intent, show them various coupons for their exact search term, and then they would hopefully transact with those coupons and earn us revenue. The key difference here, compared to competitors, would be that the coupons were vetted by Slickdeals’ deal editor team, and that we would also include confidence scores to indicate to users how likely a coupon was to work. Additionally, users would start from this site rather than a typical search engine, and we would eventually turn this product into a mobile app or even a browser extension.
Option 2: User-Centric Coupons
Keeping in mind our goals of reimagining the coupon experience, our other option was to create a more user-centric coupon site. In this version, simplification was key. Only real, working coupons would be allowed, so that a user would be guaranteed a positive outcome. Furthermore, the user flow model here was different. Users would use our site as a destination, knowing they could trust the quality of the coupons. Our site would fall at the beginning of their shopping journey, rather than at the end of it.
User Acquisition Considerations
One key consideration for our product strategy here had to do with how users would find our coupons. After our search traffic took a hit based on Google changes, we wanted to focus on a product that would be more resilient to future algorithm updates.
Our team felt that with the user-centric option, we would be able to build a product that was valuable enough to users that they would come back, regardless of what they were looking for.
Why We Went With the User-Centric Approach
In the end, we decided to go with the user-centric approach. The acquisition concerns mentioned above played a role, but most of the decision came down to technical complexity.
The product-centric option was deemed by our engineering team to be significantly more difficult, as it required using web scraping to get both coupon and product SKU data, and then additional complexity in storing and retrieving that data.
But more importantly, with the user-centric design, we felt that we would have more control over coupons, leading to a better experience, and also had an opportunity to build a product and brand that users wouldn’t just begrudgingly tolerate, but could actually come to love.
Building for Trust: Designing a New Coupons Site Typology
Because we only had a month to go from research/ideation to presenting to executives, I had to design quick but evocative mock-ups that could convey the gist of the product without necessarily having every feature fleshed out.
Using Design to Stick(er) Out
Because this coupon site was going to work differently from a typical coupon site, it made sense to explore how it could feel different from typical coupon sites. We also wanted to appeal to younger users, so we wanted to offer something fresh and “fun” that catered to Gen-Z tastes and aesthetics.
In my early sketches and design explorations, I proposed a format where each coupon code was represented by a digital “sticker.” The idea behind these coupon stickers was that they would be saved or pinned by users to their own “coupon sticker page” with different coupons from various merchants.
The sticker approach would also help address two concerns raised in our user research, which were coupon seasonality and coupon persistence. Many coupons are only useful or relevant at a certain time, but not surfaced to the user at that right time, and many times, a user comes across a coupon when they do not need it. Additionally, some stores have persistent coupons (eg WELCOME10) that shoppers may want to keep pinned somewhere. By creating a coupon sticker page, users would be able to store all of their coupons, and have them surfaced at just the right time. This would also support our goal of creating a homebase that users would return to, independent of their individual search queries.
Unfortunately, my sticker concept was also deemed too technically difficult because it would require creating user accounts, so we needed to scrap it. However, for the home page I created some visual design assets that still felt engaging and sticker-like. Our home page was actually more critical than it is for most coupon sites because it would be the the main landing pad for our proposed acquisition channels— ads and social media placements rather than SEO.
Balancing Novelty and Familiarity
I continued searching for solutions that would build trust and create a great experience, but that would also be feasible for our engineering team. This led me to focus on how UI elements might be used to support our original goals while differentiating the site from typical coupon sites.
I started with the color palette. For Verified Coupon, as the project came to be called, I wanted to turn the typical sober coupon site color palette on its head by creating something that felt warmer, fresher, and less cluttered. Most coupon sites feature a white background with black or grey text and one or two accent colors at most, usually included in the coupon card CTAs.
For Verified Coupon’s palette, I chose a cream color for the background to give a warmer, less SEO-obsessed feel. Verified Coupon is a site that we wanted users to remember and return to; we didn’t want it to feel interchangeable and forgettable. The text and and CTAs are a vibrant but grounding forest green. Green was chosen to evoke money and savings, but also as a way to stand out from the blues and purples of other coupon sites
Final Mock-Ups
After several weeks of work, and a few iteration cycles with product and engineering, I completed a working set of mock-ups for VerifiedCoupon, which we then presented to our executive team.
Takeaways And Outcomes
As a product designer, the VerifiedCoupon project was an excellent learning and growth opportunity for me. I was able to fully engage in the early product development cycle, from ideation to research, strategy to design. Here are some of my learnings from the project:
User Research Is Always Valuable
Though I considered myself very close to our users before this project, in part because I’m also an avid coupon user, I wound up learning so much from my user research. Even if the feedback ends up confirming your own assumptions, that feedback can still help you rethink, recast, or reimagine what you already know. And that reframing can help lead to a better approach in product design.
Trust Is Much Easier to Lose Than to Win (Back)
Time and time again on this project, I found myself thinking about all the users who were so angry with various coupon sites they had encountered. While I worked hard to create designs that would be worthy of their trust, I kept returning to this fact – trust is easier to lose than it is to get back.
Technical Tradeoffs Can Be the Path Forward
After I was told my sticker concept was too difficult, I quickly raced to find a new design that would encapsulate much of the same feel of the stickers, without being nearly as difficult on our engineers.
Outcomes
Unfortunately, after presenting our work to the executive team, Slickdeals went through a strategic restructuring that saw the entire coupons project postponed. While this meant that the project wasn’t completed, I am still proud of the work our team did in rethinking the coupons experience, and believe the lessons learned apply to any design where user trust is critical–which is to say, almost anything.