Verizon
Making a Multiline Promotion Easy to Understand
Platform
Web
Role
Experience Designer
Duration
July - December 2025
Handoff
December 2025
Launch
January 2026
Overview
Verizon wanted to encourage customers to add more lines to their accounts with a simple incentive:
Add a line. Get a $200 Verizon Gift Card.
Customers could earn up to $600 for three lines or more.
My task was to design a progress tracker that made the promotion feel rewarding while helping customers understand exactly where they stood and how much more they could earn.
The problem
Promotional offers with redemption caps create a deceptively difficult communication problem.
A customer needs to understand three things almost immediately:
What have I earned?
What do I need to do to earn more?
What's the maximum reward?
If those answers live primarily in copy or fine print, customers have to stop and interpret the offer.
I wanted the interface itself to communicate the rules.
My goal
Create an engaging progress tracker that motivates customers to add lines while reducing the cognitive effort required to understand the promotion.
Starting with the reward
My first explorations focused on the most straightforward approach: show customers how much they could earn in Verizon Gift Cards.
The early concepts treated the progress bar primarily as a reward display.
Initial iterations of the progress bar
When "more exciting" isn't always better
In a review with product partners, the team wanted the experience to feel more exciting and suggested adding animated confetti.
I understood the goal: the promotion needed to feel rewarding.
But I was concerned that animation would add visual noise to an already information-dense purchase experience.
Rather than simply pushing back on the request, I proposed alternative ways to create a stronger sense of reward while keeping the experience focused.
I explored three design levers:
Reward
Shift the promotional palette from standard Verizon red toward positive green tones associated with earning and completion.
Progress
Use explicit checkmarks to make completed milestones immediately recognizable.
Urgency
Introduce a bold Digital Exclusive treatment to give the offer greater prominence without relying on animation.
The goal was to create excitement through the interface itself, rather than through decoration.
Following the feedback session, I partnered with a content strategist to craft concise copy explaining the redemption caps. I also refined the UI to create a more vibrant and engaging visual experience.
Iterations without in-progress bar indication of redemption progress with more exciting visual design.
Letting the UI do the explaining
The visual direction was stronger, but another issue remained.
The supporting copy explained the three-line maximum, while the progress bar communicated something slightly different.
The two pieces weren't telling the same story.
That mattered because customers often scan a promotional experience rather than read every word.
So I made a key shift:
The progress bar itself needed to communicate the rules.
I embedded step-by-step indicators directly into the component so customers could understand, at a glance:
how many lines they'd added
how many rewards they'd earned
how many additional lines remained eligible
where the $400 maximum occurred
The supporting copy could then reinforce the offer rather than carry the entire cognitive load.
The final iteration.
Launch and outcome
The final experience launched as a controlled A/B test to 15% of web traffic.
The promotion was ultimately ended earlier than planned for business reasons, so the test did not provide the long-term performance data we had hoped to collect.
But the project still produced an important design outcome:
The final experience demonstrated that visualizing the promotion's rules could reduce the amount of explanatory copy needed while making the reward structure easier to scan.
More importantly, it gave me an opportunity to practice advocating for the customer while staying aligned with the business objective.
What I learned
This project reinforced a principle I now bring to promotional and e-commerce experiences:
If a customer needs to read the rules to understand the interface, the interface probably isn't doing enough work.
The best version of the progress tracker wasn't the one with the most visual excitement. Rather, it was the one that made the promotion understandable in a single glance.
The experience evolved from showing the reward → showing progress → showing the rules through progress itself.
That shift made the component more useful, more accessible, and ultimately more persuasive without adding more complexity.