The Problem
Albertsons' loyalty ecosystem was rich — coupons, rewards, deals, partnerships, membership benefits. But the experience leading into it was almost entirely built around one action: clipping. Clip a coupon, done.
That single-action framing left a huge amount of value invisible to shoppers. Rewards you'd already earned. Partner benefits sitting unclaimed. Personalized deals that never surfaced. The product wasn't broken — it was just telling the wrong story.
The opportunity was to redesign the entry point into the loyalty experience entirely: to make it a destination that invited discovery, enabled curation, and supported a smarter, more optimized shopping trip — not just a clipping utility.
"The problem wasn't the coupons. It was that the experience stopped there."
Beyond discovery, there was a structural challenge: how do you unify deals, rewards, partnerships, and membership benefits into a single coherent experience without it feeling like a dumping ground? That required real information architecture work — defining hierarchy, relationships, and flow across a broad and complex product surface.
Previous experience — clip-centric, low discoverability
Rewards lived separately — no connection to deals or benefits
The Approach
We started with the shopper's mental model, not the product org chart. What does someone actually want when they open the app before a shopping trip? They want to know what they can save, what they've earned, and what's worth their attention — in that order.
That framing shaped the architecture of Savings Hub. Rather than presenting loyalty as a set of disconnected features, we designed it as a unified destination: one surface that surfaced the right savings at the right moment, with the ability to go deeper into any dimension — deals, rewards, partner offers, or membership perks.
Working alongside a team of designers, agency partners, marketing, and business and SLT stakeholders, the design process balanced user needs against commercial goals, banner-specific constraints, and a complex technical landscape. Coordination was as much the work as the craft.
Key design decisions included: how to weight and sequence content without it feeling algorithmic or sales-y; how to handle the transition between browsing and shopping mode; and how to create a system flexible enough to support ongoing merchandising and personalization without requiring a redesign every campaign cycle.
Information architecture — unifying loyalty, deals, rewards, and benefits into a single entry point
Hub entry — savings overview
Deals — curated and personalized
Rewards — visible, actionable
The Work
The final design brought together all of Albertsons' loyalty value into one cohesive hub — a surface that works as both an entry point and a destination. It gives shoppers visibility into everything available to them: clippable deals, rewards balances, partner offers, and membership benefits — surfaced in a way that feels curated, not cluttered.
The shopping flow was redesigned end-to-end. From discovery through redemption, the experience guides users through the savings ecosystem in a way that maps to how they actually shop — not how the product was originally built.
The system was designed to flex. Content, hierarchy, and featured placements can be updated by marketing and merchandising teams without breaking the design intent — a critical requirement given the cadence of promotional cycles across Albertsons' banner family.
Savings Hub — launched experience
Early Signals
Savings Hub launched in early 2025 and is currently in active A/B testing. It's one week in — too early for conclusions, but the right questions are being asked and the instrumentation is in place to learn quickly.
The metrics we care about: engagement beyond clip rate, time-to-value for new loyalty members, benefit discovery across non-coupon categories, and overall session depth within the hub.