Groupon

Process

  • Illustrator

  • Visual design

  • Storyboarding

  • Animation

Holiday-ify Groupon

During the holiday season of 2018, we decided to bring some holiday delight to our mobile application in the form of a festive app icon and pull to refresh illustration + animation. We planned to measure how adding seasonal theme and decoration may increase customer engagement.

Time frame

Jul 2018 - Nov 2018 (5 mo)

Platforms

Mobile (iOS & Android)

Team

I collaborated with another designer and with:

  • 1 Project Managers

  • 1 Engineers

Design Process

A colleague and I volunteered to work on this initiative as we both have a visual design background and thoroughly enjoy creating illustrations. After we developed a solid list of holiday themes or symbols, we began sketching out potential concepts.

As the symbol of the holidays can be a controversial topic, we made it a top priority to stay away from any religious representations that would cause anything other than “delight”. Here are the 2 sets of explorations (not chosen concept):

Snow Globe

Snow globes or snow is representative of the holiday season, but considering not all regions experience the winter season, we decided against this concept in order for us to be inclusive of our international customers.

String Lights

String lights bring a sense of festivity and this concept was the runner up.

Results & Learnings

Groupon’s marketing campaigns during the holidays always revolve around gifting — we are an online marketplace after all. This gifting concept was just too perfect for us to pass up.

The pull to refresh design was tested as an A/B experiment where it yielded about a 1% increase in conversion. It is not a significant number; however, it suggests that bringing delight into our product does count for something.