Groupon

Process

  • UX design

  • Prototyping

  • Visual & Interaction design

Suggest a Promo Code

As part of the conversion team, one of our primary goals is to build a more seamless checkout experience by removing friction points. During a formative research, we learned that errors are a big reason for drop off among our customers — and specifically, promo code related failures.

How might we improve the promo code error experience in checkout to reduce checkout abandonment?

Time frame

May 2018 - Aug 2018 (4 mo)

Platforms

Web (Desktop & Mobile) & Mobile (iOS & Android)

Team

I led the design and collaborated with:

  • 1 Project Managers

  • 2 Engineers

  • 1 Content Strategist

  • 1 Researcher

Problem Statement

70% of customers who face errors at checkout are hit with an error related to a promo code failure. Based on an error reason code analysis, we found the majority of these errors were: invite only, expired or the deal was an exclusion from the promotion. Our UX researcher conducted a survey through an email to Groupon customers who abandoned checkout within 24 hours:

“It’s disappointing to realize at checkout that a coupon I had doesn’t work. It wasn’t going through with my purchase, so I left the transaction.”
— Groupon customer

For our customers, we need to improve the promo code error experience to proactively guide the customer throughout their purchase journey. For the business, we need to reduce checkout abandonment by alleviating the friction points experienced by our customers.

Hypothesis

This product challenge inspired discussions of potential solutions to improve the promo code experience in checkout. The world around promo codes is complex, involving many different teams, many parts of the overall customer journey and has a financial impact on the organization.

Among the various initiatives within the organization, promo codes were not a key area of focus. So, we started with a low impact concept: suggesting a “counter” promo code when a customer attempts to apply an expired or invite only promotion — consider these are the top error reason codes.

We hypothesized that by offering a “counter” promotion, we can reduce friction for customers who show intent of applying a (expired or invite only) promo code and achieve a positive impact to conversion by reducing abandonment.

The product manager informed us of some restrictions we were required to set — leading us to limit the “counter” promotion to expired promo codes only and only on days there is a promotion running already. By offering this promotion to customers who tried to use an expired one, we limit this test to focus on the high intent users. Through this test, we might better understand the impact of promo codes on customer behavior and how mitigating errors impact purchase behavior.

What does success look like?

  • Improve promo code error occurrences

  • Positive impact on conversion

Design Process

Highlighting a few critical steps throughout the overall design process:

01 Defining the userflow

While mapping out the potential user-flows, I had debated whether to automatically apply the “counter” code or allow the customer to click and apply it. In a world where we generally want less work for our customers, auto applying the “counter” code makes sense because it’s one less click.

However, the click to apply approach had compelling benefits:

  • Ensure awareness of the counter code applying (auto applying could assume expired code worked)

  • Delight factor of discovering & winning a counter code

02 Defining the interaction

After we had decided on click to apply, we had to figure out how to display the counter code. We explored modals, appending the counter code to the error message and so on.

We decided on a solution where we pause the moment a customer hits apply after entering an expired code and before the customer sees an error message. This eliminates the need to show the customer a negative message like “your code has expired” and instead offers a delightful surprise — a counter discount.

Because this interaction was very specific, I built out a prototype in Principle. This was helpful in clearly demonstrating the full concept during the product, engineering and design review.

As part of the design process, the product manager and I took this feature into design review — a forum where all members of the UX team (design, content strategy and UX research) offer constructive feedback. With the feedback from various groups, we were able to work towards finalizing the designs.

Results

This feature launched successfully across all platforms globally. We reduced the occurrences of promo code errors, while increasing conversion by ~8% and improving our customer’s experience.

Suggesting a promo code only alleviates a subset of promo code errors. However, this smaller impact feature has helped us build more confidence in pushing for bigger impacts we can make in the overall promo code experience.