The Citi Mobile App's Rewards Hub is where customers track and redeem points and air miles they've earned using rewards credit cards. These cards make Citi a lot of money, and in late 2022, leadership announced a major initiative to completely redesign the Hub.
This was a high-visibility project—complete with code names and NDAs—and I was announced as the lead copywriter.
I'll walk you through each part of the Rewards Hub redesign and explain how months of research, focus groups, user testing, and compliance optimization informed my writing and content strategy.
User testing informed us that customers want personalization and rewards status at-a-glance.
In turn, we built a header that greets customers by name; allows them to easily cycle through rewards cards (as customers who track points carefully usually have more than one card), shows how many points they've earned, and displays how much more they need to spend to advance their Rewards Status, which is essentially a rewards multiplier.
This header tested highly in focus groups.
Directly below the header are two tabs titled "Redeem" and "My Points".
We built a tile with three sub-tabs:
Next, we wanted to show all the interesting things users could do with their points. Citi partners with some of the world's biggest retailers where cardholders can redeem points, but studies showed that most customers had no clue.
We also had major contracts with said retailers, who wanted our customers shopping there.
I wrote all the copy you see here.
Remember the "Planned" sub-tab I mentioned earlier? Here's what it looks like. The goal was to show cardholders all the wonderful possibilities awaiting customers with more points.
All-inclusive vacations, premium hotels, even entire trips—all of it at within reach, if only they'd apply for other rewards cards, or spend a little bit more on the cards they already had.
We built this section as a carousel for easy swiping, and I wrote all blurbs you see here.
Switching from the "Redeem" to the "My Points" section presents customers with a visual breakdown of their current spending habits and where they're earning rewards.
Citi's rewards cards have points multipliers when used at various vendors; some cards earn triple points at gas stations, some earn double at restaurants and food delivery services, etc. A planned future version of this section would show users how they could use their cards to earn even more points.
