At H-E-B, we are *known* for our yellow coupons!  Taped on products, or hanging from a shower hook, we save our customers on essential and featured items every day by adding a yellow coupon.  So, how do we bring that same eye-catching attention to savings online as our customers choose our digital shopping options like Curbside and Delivery?

H-E-B’s Digital team gathered the big brains from the product, design, and engineering teams to tackle this problem… with widgets!

A new iOS feature helps create an easy shortcut!

A recent Apple software update introduces widgets to their operating system that allows users to get timely updates from their favorite apps quickly and easily on their phones. These widgets provide glanceable nuggets of content that lets users quickly access the associated app and content. Essentially, they give us a simple way to create a shortcut to the coupon function of the H-E-B app and provide direct links for customers to easily access their digital coupons. No more fumbling for barcodes or locating coupons online, with just a click of the coupon widget customers were there – just like the easy use of our yellow coupons.

Using the same endpoint that populates the coupons gallery on the H-E-B app, the widget highlights new coupons every hour, between the hours of 5 a.m. and 11:59 p.m., and automatically refreshes to show new coupons once the user clips one. This gives customers a window to continuously view fresh offers and products throughout the day. The more a customer clips coupons, the more tailored their experience is as the app learns their buying trends – making the deals even sweeter!

The widget also allows customers to discover H-E-B’s latest deals, new products, and quickly see their store’s Weekly Ad. This is a nice perk for our online shoppers because they aren’t physically in the store browsing to discover new items, hot deals, or our ever-popular Combo Loco offers. They can quickly see new products and promotions and add them to their carts with a tap of the widget.

So far, widgets are proving useful for our iOS shoppers

To date, the launch of H-E-B’s savings widget has been a breeze!  Since joining our ecosystem, the widget has not caused an excess or undue technical maintenance burden. Overall customer engagement is high and we’re hearing positive feedback about its ease of use and convenience.

Additionally, developing the widgets allowed us an isolated and effective way to explore Swift UI, a new framework for writing user interfaces for an iOS app that lets you see real-time updates for what you are writing, reducing developer frictions, and increasing developer satisfaction.  After experimenting with Swift UI for widgets development, the framework is now more widely adopted across our teams.

Our Partners are happy about the widget, too!  It allows us to easily access Partner VPP (Valued Partner Perks) offers and saves time for our checkers when customers can quickly find their coupons with the digital coupon code scanner. While we’re still introducing this widget to customers, we’re already very pleased with its addition to our digital offerings. We love making saving money easy!

iPhone and iPad users who have the My H-E-B app (version 2.10.0 or greater) installed can add our Savings-based widgets to their home screen via the widget’s gallery.