YOUTech Coupon Platform

I led design for YOUTech’s cloud-based coupon creation platform, designing it from the ground up to empower retailers to deliver experiences that delight shoppers and drive loyalty through coupons.

As a result, over 12 Billion digital coupons were created and downloaded over a 3 year period, increasing revenue by 500%.
Role
Lead Designer
Tools
Sketch
Invision
Adobe CS
Axure RP
Zeplin
Themes
Information Architecture
Interaction Design
UX Design
UX Research
Timeframe
6 Months
Shopper loyalty is hard to earn, YOUTech makes it easy.
In today's world of online shopping, coupon companies are a dime a dozen. 

What set YouTech apart is that they pioneered the digital coupon movement and launched the first program that integrates digital offers with loyalty cards and unique IDs.

YouTech’s coupon platform helps retailers drive sales through coupons— by tracking it from upon creation, to display sites, to when it was clipped, by whom — then providing retailers with tools to specifically target that shopper to encourage repeat purchase and loyalty.

In 2014, I joined YouTech as senior product designer, responsible for designing the new digital coupon SAAS web platform — from an internal administrative tool to becoming the largest retail engagement platform — serving 100 Million+ shoppers with over 13+ Billion coupon downloads in three years.
GOAL
How could we design our platform to scale at the same rate as our business?
At 40+ customers and counting, coupon creation and administration were becoming more time-consuming and frustrating for YouTech’s administrators, hampering the company’s growth. 

The company needed to scale its business, and I was responsible for leading the design to rebuild its core product — the retail engagement platform. For MVP, stakeholders wanted to concentrate on the core feature that brought us the most revenue — coupon creation.
RESEARCH
Users found the coupon creation process painful and time-consuming.
To identify the breakdowns on the current platform, I sat down with five YouTech admins, whose daily task was to upload and create offers on the existing platform.

What I discovered was surprising — several parts of the flow had to be created manually!
Key Insights
Success Goals
KEY INSIGHT 1
Overwhelming amount of form fields

A single offer had 140+ columns of data to fill out.

PROJECT GOAL 1
Bulk upload to create an offer

Make the upload process an end-to-end solution.

Make the form dynamic

Only the necessary form fields will be displayed based on the type of offer to be created.

KEY INSIGHT 2
Offer submission and review were performed outside of the platform manually

Admins took a screenshot of the offer, attached it to an email, and set it to the appropriate person on the customer team.

PROJECT GOAL 2
Make offer submission and review process part of the system.

Users will be able to submit an offer for review with one click.

Offer approvals will be clearly indicated.

KEY INSIGHT 3
Disorganized & inconsistent UI

The color palette was distracting and the UI was disorganized.

PROJECT GOAL 3
Overwhelming amount of form fields

A single offer had 140+ columns of data to fill out.

FIRST LOOK AT THE UI
Brace yourself, this could be hard to take in.
Color Palette
Neither fonts nor colors used in the UI reflected YouTech’s branding.

Lack of Structure
From the landing page, users at a loss on how to proceed. If they happened to be in luck and found themselves on the retailer page, buttons were nowhere to be found to validate their intended actions.

Disorganized Forms
While tabs exist to separate different categories of form fields that needed to be filled, every form looks like a disorganized mess with no logic to levels of importance.

Research: Exploring how we improved the UI
YOUTech’s platform would display a lot of data regarding each offer. I researched how other platforms organized about the same amount of information, and compiled a list of common themes:
Color Palette
Most companies utilized a limited palette of 2 - 3 colors with a white background color. This clean look puts less strain on the user who has to take in a lot of information.

Result: Our new primary color palette would have a limited number of colors.
Toolbars
Toolbars that contained at maximum, 5 icons that represented the most frequently used operations.

Result: We would have 5 icons that represented search, recent activity, personalization, upload, and create.
Filters
Kroger and Facebook helped users navigate through many options (date, brands, categories, etc.), allowing them to narrow down the list of items into a manageable number that satisfies their search criteria.

Result: Each offer contained (at max) 140+ columns of information. This feature will be key in helping our users hone in on offers during their search.
User Feedback
Sometimes it took an hour to upload a file, without any system response. If offer upload failed, users didn’t have a path to identify errors.

Result: Our team will have to build feedback into the new platform.
Expandable Rows
Other sites showed more information through expandable rows.

Result: Our offer lists can employ the same pattern to reveal more information
IDEATION
New User Flow
I created a new user flow that would automate current manual processes and introduced new features such as Bulk Upload, Dynamic Forms, Recent Activity, Offer Review and Approval, and System Feedback that would help the user achieve the maximum number of offers being created.

Single offer creation flow:
Single upload creation flow:
Disclaimer: We also made wireframes which we iterated over, but for brevity,
I have excluded them. I am happy to show and discuss them over a call.
Style Guide + Design System
Before the Coupons redesign, we had no documentation for visual or interaction design guidelines. Since this was a project of an extremely large undertaking, with an objective of designing for scale, we needed to change this. 


We created a design system in Sketch + inVision DSM and visual style guide in Axure RP to establish consistency and accelerate the design and development process for other teams working on the platform as well. It inherited a lot of our current visuals ideas and defined our styles, typography, spacing, color, components, and interactions.

This was just the beginning of our efforts to make YouTech the best digital coupon creation service out there and was a great precursor to a more fleshed out design system we would make in the future.

THE LAUNCH
The Design Which Allowed Us to Scale
My goal was to design a simple, friendly experience that would ensure that YOUTech’s users are successful during offer upload and creation. Below is a look at the new build.
Color Palette
The former design had an unappealing background color that made readability an issue. Here, the only accent color is the YT Blue, drawing the user's eyes to important features on the page, with shades of grey to separate key areas.
Toolbar
According to interviews, these were the most common tasks our users performed—search, recent activity, personalization, upload, and create.

I chose to put all these functions in the toolbar, where users had easy access and visibility.
Filters
In the past, users had to conduct searches with a retailer offer id. Without that information, they were lost upon arrival.

For a useful faceted search, we developed filter categories and filter values that are appropriate, predictable, free of jargon, and prioritized. In our user research, we often hear people comment on how much they appreciated these tools for narrowing down search results.
Feedback (Alerts & Messages)
The most common task performed was uploading a file to create an offer (4 out of 5). However, without a feedback response, users are often left in the dark after clicking on the upload button.

Files uploaded into the system elicited the proper response through alerts and confirmation messages. A corresponding link took the user to recent activity, where they can view their uploads.
IMPACT
Results
The impact of the platform on the company as a whole has been incredible. These were the results since our launch in 2016. In 2019, Inmar, the leader in Retail Intelligence, acquired our 70+ person company for $565 Million. 
12+Billion
Digital Offers Created
5X
Revenue Increase
180+
New Retail Customers Added
760+k
UPCs covered
“YOU Tech's nimble and innovative digital coupon platform has enabled us to deliver hundreds of millions of digital coupons to our customers.”
Jeff Talbot
-Vice President of Customer Loyalty for Kroger