C.L. Jin

A designer who brings exceptional outcomes

C.L. Jin

A designer who brings exceptional outcomes

Walmart x Apple Bundle Service

Intro

A service banner that helps users make informed purchase decisions while strengthening business partnerships.

My role

Lead Designer

Duration

4 Weeks

Team

Product team x1, Business team x2, & Engineering team x2

Visit live site

Intro

A service banner that helps users make informed purchase decisions while strengthening business partnerships.

My role

Lead Designer

Duration

4 Weeks

Team

Product team x1, Business team x2, & Engineering team x2

Visit live site

Project background

Apple’s proposal

Apple proposed partnering with Walmart to promote free trials of its services (e.g., Music, News, Books, TV+, AirPods) via banner ads on Walmart’s eCommerce pages to reach everyday shoppers.

Problem & opportunity

Lack of contextual trial promotion

Walmart.com lacked clear, upfront promotions of Apple’s free trial offers during shopping, causing missed trials, lower perceived value, and reduced activations/revenue for both brands.

Opportunity

Clear, upfront trial information empowers informed decisions, boosts engagement, and drives mutual growth.

Existing design

Search result page

Existing design

Item page

Goal & metrics

Project expectation

Launch a prominent banner highlighting Apple trial benefits with a post-transaction email redemption point to achieve 25% higher CTR.

Primary goal - Build a lasting partnership with Apple by supporting their offers at scale on Walmart's platform.

Secondary target — A 25% lift in click-through, set as a directional benchmark rather than a hard requirement.

Outcome & result

Adopted beyond Apple

Click-through rose 144% and conversion 1.6x, far past the 25% benchmark.

On the strength of that performance, the same pattern was extended to Vizio's product line following Walmart's acquisition.

144%

Increase in
click-through rate

1.6 x

Increase in
conversion rate

Process & Exploration

Key decisions and challenge in achieving product success

Choosing the right format for the offer, backed by data

Ad banners were pulling a 0.017% click-through rate: customers ignored them and didn't trust the content. The text-based banners I designed for Affirm delivered an 18% uplift in engagement.

0.017% click-through rate

Advertise banner failed to earn customer trust

18% uplift in engagement

Concise info reduces overload

Serving user intent with transparency

Text-led content works best for users with specific shopping intent, while icon- and image-led banners serve browsing users better. Browsing is exactly our target user's profile. The final version pairs the icon with an exact dollar value, so the benefit is both scannable and concrete.

Solution #1

A text-led banner fits better for users with specific shopping intent

Solution #2

An icon-led banner message fits better for users with browsing intent

Solution #3

Adding an exact dollar value and service icon brings better clarity

A scalable template that cuts engineering effort

I worked with engineering to build a template that pulls service information and benefits directly from Apple's API. It handles both single and multiple offers without hard-coding. This lets Apple update the content on their side as their business strategy changes.

Process & Exploration

V1.0 design exploration

Shopping experience

The exploration of the banner helps build a great start to test the banner length on different page and led to different component variant depends on the length limitation.

Checkout experience

During my design process for V1.0, I expanded the banners to the entire journey, including cart and checkout, to maintain consistency.

Post-transaction experience

I also introduced post-purchase entry points in thank-you pages, emails, and claim pages, creating a cohesive flow that aligned expectations and simplified redemption for Sara.