American Express Plenti Rewards Experience

Consumer Financial Services and Rewards Platform • Launched Q3 2016

Plenti was introduced as a coalition loyalty program designed to help customers earn and redeem rewards across multiple brands, but its value was often obscured by unclear point displays and dense offer layouts. In this project, I redesigned how reward points were displayed to make balances, earnings, and redemptions easier to understand at a glance. I also reworked the offer tiles and reshaped the information hierarchy across web and mobile, helping customers more quickly scan, compare, and act on relevant offers. The result was a clearer, more intuitive rewards experience that reduced cognitive load and improved engagement with Plenti’s loyalty ecosystem.


Role: Senior Product Designer

Stakeholders: Product Owner, Engineering, Content Strategist

Timeline: 5 months

Product Launch Date: Q3 2016

Platform: Desktop

The Problem

Screenshot of Plenti rewards webpage showing partner offers, including Exxon Mobil, Hulu, Direct Energy, and Alamo, with points offers and activation buttons.

Despite Plenti’s promise to streamline rewards by combining points from hundreds of retailers into a single program, many users found the experience confusing and difficult to use. Customers struggled to understand how Plenti differed from their existing loyalty programs, how to track their points, and the value of their rewards, resulting in low engagement and frustration.

This lack of clarity wasn’t just a usability issue; it also had a measurable impact on overall platform engagement:

<50%

Of Plenti members redeemed their earned rewards, signaling confusion around point value and how to take action within the program

65%

Of Plenti members cited that they don’t clearly understand how to use their rewards

Understanding The Customer

Building on prior usability research, I mapped an end-to-end customer journey to clearly illustrate the happy path and develop a stronger understanding of how that experience unfolds from start to finish.

Infographic titled 'Customer Actions' illustrating the steps a customer takes to engage with Plenti, including discovering Plenti, signing up, completing enrollment, earning points, activating offers, checking device for offers, redeeming offers, linking accounts, downloading the app, using Plenti points, and earning points at a second sponsor, depicted with various scenes and icons.

To deepen understanding of customer behaviors and expectations, I revisited a September 2013 usability study involving 12 active loyalty program users. Participants tracked their shopping habits prior to testing, allowing us to examine not only how Plenti was used but also how rewards programs fit into their everyday decision-making. The research revealed a set of recurring “little wins” that shaped how participants valued and trusted loyalty programs:

Three handwritten responses to questions about experiences with rewards and loyalty programs. The first states, 'I save money.' The second states, 'I provide for my family.' The third states, 'I rely on them to save me money.'

Based on these insights, we identified three core user types the product aimed to support, and chose to focus on the persona, Bridget, who best embodied the shared needs, behaviors, and motivations across all three.

Profile card of a woman named Bridget, age 18-79, working as a sales assistant in the Midwest with high tech usage. Includes her bio about enjoying finding deals, her motivations for work, a quote about shopping at Macy's, and points about her pain points with reward systems.

Reimagining the Home Screen Experience

Guided by past usability research and the primary persona, I led a design studio to rapidly explore and align on clearer ways to surface reward points and offers. Using low-fidelity wireframes, we pressure-tested concepts through quick usability sessions with employees outside the Plenti team to validate clarity and signal. Because Plenti’s success depends on customers actively earning and redeeming rewards, the home screen, our highest-traffic entry point, needed to do more than drive offer activation. The objective was to make progress immediately visible, reinforce value, and move customers from awareness to action.

Three iPhone screen designs displaying different mobile app interfaces: the first shows a home screen with partner offers, points, and expiration dates; the second shows a dashboard with available points, savings, and store options; the third shows a points gauge with options to use points or save.

Simplifying the Display of Reward Points

Users primarily logged into Plenti to check their point balance, yet that information was buried in navigation. Surfacing points upfront increased motivation, but testing revealed a clear gap: users needed immediate point-to-dollar clarity to understand real value and take action.

Screenshots of a Macy's rewards program for partner offers, showing options to earn points on shopping for handbags, fuel, and car rentals, with details on points needed, expiration dates, and activation buttons.

Reshaping the Hierarchy of Information

Users prioritized brand and point value when browsing offers, but dense, unfocused tiles led to disengagement. I restructured the offer tiles around user priorities, simplifying content and clarifying the hierarchy in partnership with the content team. Testing confirmed the redesign improved scannability, focus, and overall engagement.

A cartoon person holding a smartphone with three speech bubbles above their head. The speech bubbles contain text about checking points, finding an offer, and exploring offers, in different colors.

Overall, users responded positively to the idea of a dashboard in the Plenti app, valuing its ability to quickly support their most important tasks:

Primary user goals:

  • Check Plenti point balance

  • Find and explore relevant offers

However, feedback also highlighted clear opportunities to make the dashboard more user-centered:

Key improvement areas:

  • Visual design and content should better reflect memebers’ use cases and emotional motivations

  • Labels and messaging should consistently prioritize user language over Plenti-centric terminology

Affinity Mapping and Iterations

From the testing, we gathered qualitative feedback by evaluating early design concepts and identifying patterns across user goals and pain points. We then synthesized these insights through affinity mapping to surface key themes and guide design decisions.

Whiteboard filled with handwritten notes, diagrams, and colored sticky notes, discussing marketing strategies, user engagement, and campaigns in a business or educational setting.

Based on the results, I continued to iterate on my designs with the team for the next 3 weeks and we made 3 major improvements:

Screenshots of a mobile app showing user points and rewards balance for a loyalty program. The screens display welcome message, current points, points needed to earn savings, and total savings amount.

Meter Design

Based on user feedback, clarity around reward value was critical. Users needed to quickly see both their point balance and its real dollar value. The meter surfaces totals upfront with a clear conversion to eliminate guesswork and shifts from segmented units to a solid bar at higher balances to preserve legibility as totals grow.

Screenshots of a mobile app displaying a points or rewards program, showing total available points, offers, activated offers, and expiring offers, with navigation tabs at the bottom.

Dedicated Offers Section

In the original design, activated offers were saved under the “Activated” tab, but the placement was unintuitive and often overlooked. User feedback revealed a need for clearer organization to help members manage saved offers more effectively. Introducing a dedicated Offers section made saved offers easy to find and added visibility into upcoming expirations, prompting timely action and increasing offer usage.

A digital offer for Spring for Points at Rite Aid, displaying a chance to earn 2000 points after spending $50, with an activate button, and a green confirmation screen indicating the offer has been activated.

Dynamic Offer Tile

Usability testing informed a reordering of the offer tile hierarchy to prioritize point value, the primary motivator for saving and using offers. Upon activation, a dynamic animation confirms the action and moves the offer into the Activated section, creating a clear sense of progress and a more rewarding, confidence-building experience.

Final Design

Launch and Impact (Q3 2016)

The redesigned Plenti experience launched in Q3 2016 and helped sustain strong program momentum by making rewards easier to understand and redeem. Following launch, the program continued to scale rapidly, reinforcing the value of clearer reward visibility and offer engagement.

36M

Within six months since launch, Plenti attracted ~36 million active members, demonstrating strong initial adoption for its coalition loyalty model

60%

Increase in new member registrations as users better understood the value of joining