UX research

Context: Existing MVP

The Offers team launched their MVP in Q4 2019 to get signal on the idea before pitching to affiliate merchants to participate in the program. When users landed on a merchant PDP with an Offer, we'd autopop a limited-time offer to be activated or claimed. A few months after launch, the idea performed beautifully and got the green light to be integrated into all Honey surfaces.
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Shoutout to the incredible Anita Wei, who designed the foundations of the experience, conducting several rapid user tests on layout, messaging, and comprehension before finalizing the MVP design.

Existing MVP Offer shows when you visit a merchant PDP with an active Offer

Reaching More Users

At the time, users who weren't logged into the extension or joinhoney.com weren't eligible to see or claim Offers, leaving about 30% of users on the table. I designed the logic and user flows for surfacing Offers to these users, giving them a quick and easy way to log in or sign up to claim their Offer (and driving user sign ups at the same time).

Mapping the logic for unlocking ineligible (not logged in) users by logging in/registering during a user shopping session

Once I had the flow and wires done, I began working on production designs for the UI. I wanted to establish a subbrand for Offers so it'd be more easily recognizable, so I went with our gold500 color for the logo and the CTA, as it could easily scale to other Offers placement.

New UI for the Offer popup using Honey Gold subbranding

New UI in context within the user flow

Optimizing CTR on Tips

Honey Tips shows users relevant deals and useful information when shopping online. The Offers placement in the Tips container wasn't performing as well as we'd hoped, so I spent a cycle designing ways to optimize Offers CTR without expensive changes.

After talking through several options with the devs, we landed on a easy-to-build, eye-catching skeleton loader that would 1) give the user time to orient themselves when the Tips container first appears and 2) build some anticipation to what juicy Offers there were. This quick change ended up increasing CTR by 14%.

Design spec to help devs implement a skeleton loader on show of the Tips container

Redesigning Offers the joinhoney.com PDP

I went on to optimize another key placement for Offers: the joinhoney.com PDP. At the time, the company wanted to grow joinhoney.com as a top-of-funnel shopping destination (instead of showing up further down the shopping journey), and Offers was a key value proposition to that idea.
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The main KPI for the design was increasing CTR on the Offer CTA, but I also wanted to further establish the subbrand with a well-executed UI. I wanted the Offer to feel like an exciting, rare opportunity for a great deal. Our Offer amounts were huge, sometimes reaching over $100 USD, so I wanted to do the core value prop justice with UI.

My PM pushed me to pursue divergent patterns that were visually arresting, so I explored new UI outside our design system and generally went over the top initially.

UI explorations for flashy Offers placements on the joinhoney.com PDP. I tried to lean heavily on grouping and color to highlight the Offer.

After the first round of exploration, it was time to iterate with more restraint, which often translates to cohesiveness, scalability, and accessibility. I landed on combining the CTA with the Offer details module for strong grouping and versatile layout.

The final Offers component was pared down significantly but made more sense strategically as it was the easiest to implement and uses the same branding on the extension popup.

Final UI in context of the joinhoney.com PDP at different breakpoints

Leveraging Email for Abandoned Carts

Emails were an important channel for Offers—We could reach shoppers outside their shopping journey after they've signaled purchase intent. We wanted to reduce cart abandonment by applying Offers on items shoppers had already added to cart.

I thought of the emails as an extension of the subbranding work I did for the extension, tips, and the PDP. So I wanted to keep the gold and flashiness, but make it easy to implement on email (which is a notoriously difficult platform to design for with its limited styling capabilities tied to a bunch of different platforms).

I started off with some research on cart abandonment (a well-studied area in e-commerce), looking at the literature and email examples from competitors.

Bird's eye view of the research I collected in Figma

After understanding the space better, I constructed the flow within our technical constraints and mechanics (e.g. Offer activation, login status, and extension status).

User flow for cart abandonment and recovery via Offer injection

Using the insights from my research and an understanding of the technical rails powering Offers, I landed on two designs we could test against each other: one basic and one more visually rich. The latter outperformed the former and the control by over 40%.

Final UI for the Offers email variants

Launching Gold Rewards Across PayPal & Venmo

At the end of my tenure on the Offers team (post PayPal acquisition), product leadership at PayPal had decided to leverage Honey's rewards program across all PayPal and Venmo under a unified program: Gold Rewards.

I was tasked with creating a brand guideline for product and marketing teams to implement Gold Rewards. I worked closely with the amazingly talented designer, Julie Logue, who would go on to take my place on the Offers team. Together, we collaborated with the wonderful folks in Product Messaging and Visual Arts to build and roll out the guideline.

Title card for the deck

Iconography, color, and imagery specs

Gold Rewards examples on the PayPal app

Outcomes & Conclusion

Offers was one of the first iterative projects I did at Honey (vs. 0→1). Although things felt a little slower, there was more time to do research and optimize through design. After several projects starting from scratch and moving super fast, working on Offers was satisfying and refreshing.

The performance numbers for each individual track I completed on Offers is lost to history/out of my reach at the moment, so I will go off the partnership team's official numbers: Offers sees a 333% average lift in conversion rate after activating an Offer, an 11% reduction in cross-site comparison shopping after seeing an Offer, and a 38% lift in 30 day new customer repurchase rate.