Top Deals: Eligible Items Quick View

Overview

As part of my UX design internship at Target, I worked on the Deals team during their transition to an offer-led shopping experience that aims to help guests discover and act on promotions more efficiently. While the new offer-first model surfaced more deals, it also introduced friction: guests often had to leave the deals grid to browse eligible products, resulting in repetitive navigation and comparison fatigue.

Our team explored a “quick view” experience that allows guests to preview eligible items for a deal without losing context. I contributed to end-to-end design exploration, usability testing, and iteration of a redesigned flyout that balanced transparency with speed. The design solution performed well in our final A/B experiment, validating our impulse that reducing friction directly supports conversion in offer-led shopping.

Research & Insights

Understanding Deal-Hunting Behavior

In the offer-led Unified Deals experience, guests encounter promotions before products. This shift created a new goal: boosting confidence. Guests wanted to understand what they could buy before committing to a deal, especially when comparing multiple offers. Key observations from existing flows and prior data:

• Guests frequently “pogo-sticked” between the deals grid and full product listing pages

• Each navigation break increased effort during deal comparison

• Existing quick-view patterns in other surfaces showed strong engagement, suggesting that keeping guests in context mattered

Core Insight: Guests don’t need all items immediately — they need enough visibility to decide whether a deal is worth exploring.

Problem Statement: How might we help guests preview and shop eligible items for a deal without leaving the deals grid or losing context?

Early Direction

We explored reviving a flyout pattern that had previously existed for some deal types. These earlier versions were removed due to friction, large visual footprint, and low clarity. Rather than reintroducing the pattern wholesale, we reframed the challenge as:

• What information is essential above the fold?

• What can be progressively disclosed?

• How do we support both fast scanning and deeper exploration?

This led to the hypothesis that a condensed, item-forward flyout could reduce navigation overhead while preserving transparency.

Iterating…

Round 1: Exploratory Testing

Initial designs compared a revised flyout against the existing experience. Feedback from X participants on UserTesting was mixed:

• Some users preferred the familiarity of the current pattern

• Others appreciated seeing eligible items immediately

• Literal differences between deals (not layout alone) influenced preferences

Key takeaway: Visibility ≠ redundancy. Even skimmed information builds trust.

Round 2: Refinement & Retest

To isolate design signal from content bias, we:

• Tested identical deal data across variants

• Kept fulfillment methods visible

• Pushed fine-print details lower in the hierarchy

• Prioritized eligible items above the fold

Users reported improved clarity and reduced effort, though preferences remained nuanced—highlighting the tension between efficiency and transparency in retail UX.

Final Solution

The final design reintroduced a streamlined quick view flyout that:

• Keeps guests anchored in the deals grid

• Surfaces a preview list of eligible items immediately

• Maintains clear access to fulfillment methods

• Links out to the full DPLP for deeper browsing

• Adheres closely to Target’s design system and accessibility standards

The experience was designed across multiple states (signed in/out, Circle vs. non-Circle) and handed off with detailed documentation to support engineering implementation.

Experiment & Outcomes

The redesigned quick view was shipped as an A/B experiment. The treatment met the benchmark for add-to-cart lift and was approved for production rollout, indicating that the design meaningfully improved guest engagement under real conditions.

Next Steps

• Continue refining information density as deal types expand

• Explore adaptive layouts for deals with very small or very large eligible sets

• Further investigate where friction is productive versus where it should be removed

Reflections

Challenges

• Designing against prior pattern failure without overcorrecting

• Navigating close, non-binary testing results

• Balancing instinct with data when metrics were directionally positive but not overwhelming

What I Learned

This project reshaped how I think about data, confidence, and decision-making. I expected metrics to make choices obvious; instead, close results forced me to lean on judgment, clarity of intent, and iterative learning.

I learned that:

• UX decisions are rarely binary

• Some friction supports trust

• Designing at scale means optimizing for patterns, not perfection

Thank you to my mentors and to Minneapolis for a great summer!