The Problem - Low Trust, Low Adoption.
Rewards existed, but users didn’t feel confident enough to use them.
Platform UX, Product Strategy
U.S. Bank Rewards: Designing a Unified Rewards Experience Across Different Card Types
Reframing a visibility problem into a decision-making and trust challenge across a multi-team platform.
Increase in redemption
↑ Decision confidence
MVP → scalable system
Product Maturity
Cross-product consistency
2× iteration velocity
Role
Senior Product
Designer
Team
2 VD, DEV, PM, UXR & Compliance
Scope
Rewards platform & dashboard
Redemption flows (cash back, points)
Design system contributions
Duration
07/2023 - 04/2025
Overview
I led the end to end design of U.S. Bank’s first internal rewards dashboard, transforming a fragmented third-party redemption experience into a predictable, confidence-building system that customers could actually use.
The problem I solved.
Rewards adoption wasn’t blocked by missing features — it was blocked by uncertainty at the moment of decision.
Reframing the problem: aligning business goals with user confidence.
Increased card usage was a downstream business goal but only achievable if users clearly understood when, how, and why rewards were valuable.
Business Goals
Increase card engagement
Improve perceived value
Create scalable foundation
V/S
User Reality
Value unclear at glance
Redemption felt risky
Redemption required leaving the core banking experience
Key Insight
When users confidently understand rewards, card usage naturally increases benefiting both customers and the business.
Design Strategy: How we earned user confidence.
Rather than adding more rewards features, I focused on reducing uncertainty at the moment users decide whether to redeem.
What I intentionally avoided Adding feature-heavy dashboards, promotional clutter, or early personalization because they increase cognitive load before trust is established.
How I structured the many reward models.
Before designing screens, I mapped how users reason about rewards including hesitation points and edge cases that cause drop-off.
Decision Design: Preventing failure at high-risk moments.
Rewards adoption broke down not during discovery, but at decision moments when users questioned value, feared choosing incorrectly, or worried an action couldn’t be undone. I focused design effort on these high-risk moments to reduce hesitation and prevent accidental failure.
Decision Moment 1 — Understanding Value
Rewards Overview Dashboard
Risk: Users couldn’t translate points or percentages into real value.
Design Intervention: Inline point-to-dollar conversion shown before commitment.
Outcome: Users could confidently assess value without guessing.
Decision Moment 2 — Choosing Redemption Type
Rewards Balance & Redeem Page
Risk: Fear of selecting the “wrong” redemption caused hesitation.
Design Intervention: Clear hierarchy and contextual guidance at selection.
Outcome: Reduced second-guessing and decision paralysis.
Decision Moment 3 - Committing to Redemption
Confirmation Screen
Risk: Users worried actions were irreversible or unsafe.
Design Intervention: Confirmation step with reassurance copy and clear next steps.
Outcome: Higher completion with fewer accidental redemptions.
Decision Moment 4- Same Rewards Experience Across All Cards
Scalable Rewards Framework
A flexible structure supports new reward types and card products without introducing new mental models or increasing complexity.
Where confidence broke down.
Before designing a new experience, I needed to understand how the existing dashboard shaped customer decisions.
The issue wasn’t access to rewards it was confidence at the moment of redemption.
Research & Validation: Confirming the right design decisions.
To design for confidence, I studied how users psychologically make financial decisions, how U.S. Bank’s credit card rewards actually functioned, and how leading platforms surfaced value.
These inputs grounded design decisions in real system behavior not assumptions or feature requests.
Key insights that shaped the experience
Value must be shown before commitment
Users consistently hesitated when point-to-dollar value was unclear or delayed until later steps.
Confidence is built through predictability
Competitive patterns showed that leading platforms normalize value early, even across different reward mechanics.
Leaving the banking experience increases drop-off
Navigating away from the dashboard increased redemption drop-off.
Guardrails matter more than flexibility
Early users preferred confirmation, context, and clear reversibility over advanced redemption options.
Aligning across product, engineering, and design.
As evidence accumulated, the challenge became prioritization rather than ideation. I led a cross-functional working session aligned product, engineering, and design on where clarity would have the greatest impact.
I synthesized previous insights into a small set of representative behaviors to guide design decisions during workshops without over-indexing on edge cases.
**Screenshots have been modified to preserve confidentiality while accurately representing the process and outcomes.
Exploration focused on decision flow.
These inputs directly informed the greyscale explorations, where I focused on testing clarity, confidence, and decision-making before visual polish.
These early explorations focused on structure and hierarchy, not visual styling, allowing us to validate direction quickly.
Why we shipped less on purpose.
Once the decision flow was validated, the focus shifted from exploration to what we could responsibly ship first. I pushed for a phased approach with simple MVP.
Reusing a known activity pattern prioritized consistency and speed, enabling faster validation without introducing unnecessary novelty.
This MVP prioritized confidence signals over polish, allowing early validation of core assumptions with minimal overhead.
From MVP to a scalable rewards systems.
After shipping the MVP, early feedback confirmed that clearer value framing reduced hesitation but also surfaced a new need: users wanted contextual guidance without leaving the primary flow.
This insight shifted the problem from what to show to where and when to show it.
“I could see my rewards balance, but I didn’t know what it was worth. Once the cash value was visible, it clicked immediately."
User feedback during moderated testing
The MVP revealed that guidance increased confidence only when it didn’t compete with the primary flow.
Evolving from feature to system.
As usage increased, the right-rail pattern proved scalable across rewards scenarios.The work shifted from refining a screen to strengthening a system.
The final experience prioritizes decision clarity first, with progressive disclosure supporting more complex rewards scenarios as users need them.
Expanding rewards into a full drawer allowed complex information to scale without fragmenting the core dashboard, preserving focus while supporting deeper exploration.
Addressing edge cases revealed opportunities to strengthen the underlying framework, informing future investments in personalization, extensibility, and governance.
On mobile, streaming progress reinforced momentum helping users understand rewards growth over time without requiring explicit action.
Outcomes & impact.
By focusing on confidence at high-risk decision moments, the redesigned rewards experience reduced hesitation during redemption and made value easier to understand across different card types.
Increase in redemption
↑ Decision confidence
MVP → scalable system
Product Maturity
Cross-product consistency
2× iteration velocity
What I’d do differently.
• Validate earlier with live behavioral signals
While usability testing confirmed confidence improvements, earlier access to behavioral data (drop-off, time-to-commit) would have strengthened prioritization decisions sooner.
• Expand edge-case testing across cardholders
Future iterations would include broader testing across reward-savviness levels to ensure clarity holds up at scale.
• Align longer-term feature sequencing sooner
Earlier roadmap alignment could have reduced later pressure to expand beyond MVP before confidence was fully established.
Reflection & what's next.
This project reinforced that trust is a system problem not a UI one. Designing for confidence required sequencing decisions carefully, resisting early feature expansion, and validating at moments of real risk.
Looking ahead, I would focus on evolving the framework through progressive disclosure introducing advanced reward options only after users demonstrate confidence with core flows. This approach balances business growth with long-term trust and keeps the experience predictable as the platform scales.
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