Walking on Water for Deals: A UX Look at One Firm’s Credit Card Merchant Offers

Confession time—I am a “deals girl.” I regularly screenshot merchant offers from my various credit cards, send them to my friends and say, “Hey want to try this place for dinner?” or, “Want to use my card for 15% off the rugs we went shopping for?”

However, in early 2026, a leading bank switched up its deals layout to something far more…effortful. It’s now much harder for me to determine what’s “of value,” so they’ve lost my consistent attention. I won’t cover all the details (you’ll have to check out our Credit Card Monitor report for the full tea spill) but suffice to say, using their merchant deal platform is now more trouble than it’s worth to me.

The other morning I gave the firm’s merchant offers another shot, navigating to food deals in search of a new lunch place. As I scrolled through, something felt increasingly off. I recognized none of the merchant names, save for a few chain eateries. Curious, I clicked on a merchant, hoping to find an address. Frustratingly, there was no street address, only a “Find nearest store” button that opened up the external browser version of Google Maps—sigh—but fine, I went through with it for the sake of the exercise.

And I landed in Jersey.

Here is the rub: I live on Long Island. Way out in northeast Suffolk County. There must be 20 miles of water separating me from this pizzeria on the Jersey Shore. Now, I’m no stranger to the pitfalls of a location radius, as I get dating app matches across the Long Island Sound (hi, Connecticut cuties!) but central Jersey felt like an unusually long stretch.

With my “UX Investigator” hat firmly in place, I started looking for solutions. In Sort, I found a “sort by proximity” option, which helped, but didn’t quite do the trick. I dug around in Filters to adjust the mileage radius, to no avail. In the end, I had no way to stop getting restaurant recommendations for Hackensack, New Jersey.

Given that I work at a competitive intelligence firm that benchmarks and evaluates digital interfaces, I double checked with our Credit Card Monitor team to see whether I was missing anything. Sure enough, my coworker pointed me to a radius filter hidden in only one category of the Deals site. As a food-motivated human, when I was presented with this overwhelming list earlier in my navigation journey, I chose “Food,” not even noticing “Local Offers.” No radius filter for me.

I couldn’t help but wonder why the experience was so disjointed:

• Why not auto-sort by proximity, instead of making the user find and apply it manually?
• Why was there an unusually large radius auto-set for the merchants?
• Why couldn’t the user shrink that radius in all the categories?

I left the interaction with a sense that the interface was punishing me for not using it “correctly.” As a user-focused professional, this hit deep. Here was a valuable credit card perk (which our research shows is popular), in a brand-new redesign (on which I’m sure a lot of folks worked hard), buried under a pile of poor user experience. The end user’s real-life scenario wasn’t considered. Experiences like that bum me out, and alienate real users.

To avoid being a cautionary tale in my next blog, improve your digital experiences with CI research. Our UX team can ensure your credit card merchant offers are maximizing their potential, as well as every aspect of your user experience. And check out our Insights section for more on the latest digital trends across user experience, financial services and healthcare.