The Curious Case of the Missing Button

Every store has a Rewards Card now and days. We either have a plethora on our keychains or a gaggle of them shoved in our wallets. Some stores are now letting you add your loyalty cards to their mobile apps so you don’t have to carry as much with us, which is super convenient… when you can find it in the app.

Recently one of my local grocery stores and, for me, frequently visited stores has updated their app. This is a huge improvement to what it was before, the colors, the layout and the responsiveness is leaps and bounds better but one thing was missing… my loyalty card. When I opened the app I was actually greeted by a serious of large hero images instructing me how to find my loyalty card number. Needless to say it was a serious of several steps and if you didn’t memorize the steps, then you had to go back to homepage and start all over again.

My theory is that the loyalty button was maybe forgotten in the redesign and they were adding these images as a quick fix to try to give the users something to use until the fix was put in place. I get it but it was even hard to find the loyalty card and it took away from much needed promotional space on the app for the store. This made it harder to use the app in the store and especially during checkout because you have to search through the app to find your card. I don’t know about you but for me the checkout process is sometimes the most stressful part of grocery shopping this made my user experience quite a bit more frustrating.

Before this update, you could access your card with one button that was permanently on the screen at the top right corner. I hope that this is something that is resolved soon and I can go back to my normal stress of being in a grocery store!

UPDATE: 3-4-23 I was able to update my app and today there is a whole section with quick buttons right on the homepage, the first button is the loyalty card! Their UX team got right on the problem and solved it in a beautiful way.