QUITIE

Around 45% of small shops and artisanal producers in New York close within their first years. They sell quality, and they lose to the marketing scale of the chains. Promotions are the one competitive lever they can afford.

Those promotions go unclaimed. Coupons live scattered across flyers, emails and separate apps, and redeeming one means holding up a queue while you search for it. Businesses fund discounts that expire unused, shoppers skip savings they want, and the brief followed from that: make saving with local brands fast enough to be worth doing.

I built the case around one user, Carol, a 35-year-old working mother of two who uses coupons often and finds the process exhausting. I mapped her full shopping day as an eight-step storyboard and plotted her emotional state at each stage, from planning at home to paying at the store.

The curve drops at the register. Carol stays comfortable while hunting deals at home and in the aisle. Her mood falls the moment a queue forms behind her and she is still looking for the right coupon.

Discovery is spread across too many surfaces. Deals sit in flyers, shop windows, emails and standalone apps, so finding them costs more time than the saving returns.

Visibility drives the choice. Carol picks neighbourhood brands whenever she knows they exist, which placed the design problem at discovery.

Three features, each aimed at a different point on that emotional curve.

Product Scanner. Scanning a barcode on the shelf returns the live discount and activates the offer, moving the decision into the aisle where the shopper has time.

Find and Save. Search, category filters and a favourites list let shoppers browse local brands before the trip and arrive with offers already saved.

One-code checkout. Every activated coupon applies through a single code at the register, payable by QR, cash or card.

• Moved the discount decision to the shelf, following the point where the emotional map showed the drop.
• Kept cash as a first-class payment option, since the shops this product serves depend on it.
• Built the style guide before the high-fidelity screens: 8px spacing, a pixel-perfect icon set, full component states, and a defined type and colour scale.
• Held every action to one tap from the product, designing for a shopper working under time pressure.

Qutie replaces a scattered coupon system with one flow: find, save, scan, pay. Shoppers claim discounts in the aisle and clear the register in seconds. Small shops reach nearby customers directly, without competing on advertising spend.

The project produced a complete design system with components, states, spacing and typography documented as a working style guide. It stayed an academic concept and was never released.