INDUSTRY:
FINANCE
CLIENT:
CHASE BANK
YEAR:
2025
ROLE:
LEAD EXPERIENCE DESIGNER & CREATIVE STRATEGIST
Chase Sapphire App
overview.
The Chase Sapphire Reserve is one of the most feature-rich premium credit cards in the US market, but for years, the depth of its benefits was hidden behind an app experience that struggled to communicate value at the pace cardholders expected. Millions of dollars in annual credits, perks, and rewards were going unused, not because customers didn't want them, but because the interface made them difficult to find, understand, and act on. The opportunity wasn't to rebuild from scratch; it was to surface what already existed and make it feel as premium as the card itself.
challenge.
The existing Chase app was functional but fragmented. Benefits lived in one place, Ultimate Rewards in another, travel in a third, and the connective tissue between them was thin. For a card that charges a significant annual fee on the promise of outsized value, this was a real retention problem: cardholders who couldn't easily see or activate their perks were the most likely to question the renewal. The design challenge wasn't just cosmetic. It meant reconciling a legacy information architecture that had accreted over the years with a new experience mode, one where the user's perception of card value had to be tangible, immediate, and personally relevant every time they opened the app.
The organisational complexity matched the product complexity. Working across SPCSHP (New York), MMT Digital, and Chase's own product and engineering teams meant navigating multiple stakeholders, design governance processes, and technical constraints simultaneously. The Sapphire brand carried strong equity that had to be honoured visually, but the app also had to function within the broader Chase design system, which meant every visual and interaction decision existed in productive tension between premium aspiration and platform consistency.
my role.
As Lead Experience Design on this engagement, I owned the visual and interaction design of the redesigned Benefits & Travel experience end to end, from initial concept exploration through to detailed UI specifications and developer handoff. My remit spanned information architecture, visual language, component design, and motion considerations across the full benefits ecosystem: the overview hub, individual benefit detail pages, Ultimate Rewards summary, memberships, travel, and shopping.
Beyond execution, I shaped the creative direction of the work, establishing the visual principles that guided the project, advocating for design decisions in cross-functional reviews, and ensuring the output held together as a coherent, elevated experience rather than a collection of well-designed individual screens. This was genuinely a dual role: strategic enough to influence product decisions, hands-on enough to work at the token and component level when it mattered.
approach.
Reimagining the Visual Language
Premium in a mobile context means clarity and zero cognitive friction, not luxury. The Sapphire brand gave us strong raw material: deep navy, refined typography, and associations with considered travel. I translated that equity into a design language that worked at the granularity of a benefit card or progress indicator. Editorial typographic hierarchy gave screens authority without sacrificing scannability. Navy signalled primary value moments; the off-white ground kept everything open and breathable.
Streamlining Journeys
The core jobs-to-be-done were simple: know what you have, understand how to use it, and act before it expires. I restructured the Benefits hub around a single surfaced summary of used versus unused value, with progressive disclosure into individual credit categories beneath. Benefit detail pages followed the same logic: progress indicator up top, concise how-it-works summary, unambiguous CTA. No buried terms, no unnecessary navigation depth.
Elevating Data Visualisation and Design Systems
Rewards data is easy to render in ways that feel clinical. I worked to make it feel earned, circular progress treatments for individual credits, editorial figure display for aggregate values, and category breakdowns that gave users a narrative of their own engagement. Each visualisation was designed as a composable component with clear token architecture for colour, spacing, and type scale, so future benefit types could be added without visual regression.
outcome.
The redesigned Benefits & Travel experience shipped across the Chase mobile app for Sapphire Reserve cardholders, representing one of the most significant visual and functional evolutions the benefits section had seen in several years. The immediate signal was in engagement: users were going deeper, staying longer, and taking action more frequently, not because we nudged them more aggressively, but because the experience finally made it obvious what they had and what it was worth. The reduction in benefits-related support contacts confirmed what qualitative research had suggested: most confusion wasn't about the product, it was about the presentation.
Equally significant was what the project unlocked organisationally. The component system and design language established during this engagement provided a foundation the wider Chase team could extend, a shared vocabulary for representing financial value in a premium context that didn't exist at this level of craft before. The NPS improvement among Reserve cardholders pointed to something beyond satisfaction with a screen: it reflected a shift in perceived product value with direct implications for retention and upgrade behaviour at renewal. This project demonstrated that in financial services, design quality is not a veneer; it is, in material terms, part of the product.
reflection.
The most interesting tension in this project was between aspiration and transparency. The Sapphire brand wants to feel premium and effortless, but real value communication requires showing people numbers, sometimes uncomfortable ones. Getting those two things to coexist without either feeling compromised was the design problem I kept returning to, and it turned out to be exactly the right problem to obsess over.
