Designing a deals screen that doesn't hate its users
Most coupon UIs are a punishment. We rebuilt one as a single, deep-linkable canvas, and watched engagement double.
Coupon and deals UIs are usually a graveyard of best practices. Endless tabs, rotating banners, hidden filters, two flavours of sort that don't agree, and a search bar that only matches whole words. Users tap once, get lost, and leave.
We rebuilt the deals surface for a shopping app from first principles. The brief was simple: one screen, one mental model, deep-linkable from anywhere: push, email, partner ads.
What we threw out
Tabs. The carousel. The 'For you' shelf no one understood. Eight different card variants. The 'see all' buttons that led to dead ends.
What we kept
A single feed with one card variant. A persistent filter chip row that survives back navigation. A search that fuzzy-matches across merchant, category, and tag, and shows results as you type. Deep links that open straight to a pre-filtered state.
The result
Time-to-first-tap dropped by half. Sessions per active user climbed. Conversions on deal opens roughly doubled in the first month. Most importantly: nobody complained about the redesign, usually a sign you removed the right things.