The Rewards Hub is the rewards section of the Citi Mobile App, where customers redeem points and air miles earned on rewards credit cards. It makes Citi a lot of money, and in late 2022, leadership announced that it needed a complete redesign.
This was a high-vis project—complete with internal code names and NDAs—and I was announced as the lead copywriter.
I wrote every single word in the designs you see below. I'll walk you through each part of the redesigned Rewards Hub 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.
We built a header that: greets customers by name; allows them to easily cycle through rewards cards, as customers who track points carefully have more than one card; shows how many points they've earned; and displays how much more they need to spend to achieve their next 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". What you see here is under the Redeem tab (I'll get to My Points in a bit).
We built a tile with three sub-tabs:
Next, we wanted to show users what they could do with their points, but never had. Citi partners with some of the world's biggest retailers to redeem points, and studies showed that most cardholders had no clue.
We also faced some major pressure from those major retailers, and we needed customers using shopping there.
I wrote all the copy for each of the partner tiles you see here.
Remember the "Planned" tab I mentioned earlier? That's where this section comes in. We needed a way to show cardholders all the wonderful things possibilities 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 decided to build this section as a carousel for easy swiping, and I wrote all blurbs you see here.
At the beginning, I mentioned the main page having two tabs: "Redeem" and "My Points". This is the latter—a simple-to-scan, visual breakdown of how customers are spending and where they're earning points.
Citi's rewards cards have points multipliers when used at different vendors; some cards earn triple points at gas stations, some earn double at restaurants or on 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, but this was the MVP iteration.
