From card sign-up to bucket list

We designed for three very different types of cardmember.

A prospect, a points optimizer, and a loyalist, each meeting the card at a different point in their journey.

10M+

monthly active customers

4.7 stars

rating on the new experience*

co-branded airline card, 2023**

98%

met expectation on overall experience*

*based on recorded metrics from user research surveys
**J.D. Power's 2023 U.S. Credit Card Satisfaction Study

What I owned, what I partnered on.

JetBlue owned acquisition, Barclays owned the cardholder side, and IBM iX designed across both. Here's where I led and where I contributed.

I owned

Acquisition flow design within the JetBlue booking experience
Personalized cardholder dashboard architecture on the Barclays surface
Widget-level patterns: bucket-list, credit health, credit limit, benefits-in-context, and more
Mapping what cardmembers needed into a shared framework both teams could design from

I partnered on

Keeping the JetBlue and Barclays design teams aligned across two separate systems
Research synthesis with the principal designer
Co-design sessions with the second UX designer
Stakeholder reviews across Barclays product and engineering, JetBlue marketing and PR

Three cardmembers, three relationships with the card.

IBM iX, JetBlue, and Barclays ran discovery together before design began. The three teams built personas from cardmember interviews and existing Barclays survey data. We used them as a reference throughout the project.

Prospect · JetBlue

Teri

Prospective cardmember

Planning her honeymoon. A comparison-driven shopper with a TrueBlue number she never uses.

Primary touchpoint
Booking flow

Cardholder · Barclays

Andy

Existing cardmember

Three years in, he "plays the game," paying mid-cycle to maximize points. Wants everything at a glance.

Primary touchpoint
Barclays dashboard

Cardholder · Barclays

Lauren

Loyal traveler

A JetBlue superfan who plans trips around redemptions. Wants the card to make them memorable, not just bookable.

Primary touchpoint
Barclays + TrueBlue

Discovery ran across all three teams before design started. These are the numbers behind what we worked from.

9 hrs

Stakeholder conversations

265

Cardmembers surveyed

255 min

1:1 user interviews

JetBlue needed to sell it. Barclays needed to keep people using it.

Both surfaces operated inside existing design systems with real constraints. Every decision had to work within them: JetBlue's marketing system on one side, Barclays' regulated financial system on the other.

01Acquisition on JetBlue: meet the prospect inside the trip.

Research showed the card appearing at checkout, after fare selection, was too late. Nobody was stopping mid-payment to apply. Moving it earlier, into the trip-planning phase, put the card's value in front of people while they were still deciding.

A savings callout, inline with flight prices, showed what the trip would cost as a cardmember: bag savings, points, and statement credits.
The apply flow prefilled from TrueBlue, Google, or iCloud, so three of five fields were done before the user typed.
A step tracker showed how long the application would take, removing a major drop-off point.
Once approved, the card was instantly available to pay for the booking in progress.

Acquisition flow inside the JetBlue booking experience

02A personalized dashboard that adapts to each cardmember.

The existing Barclays experience treated everyone the same, whether you'd had the card three months or three years. Same layout, same benefits page, same payment flow. The redesign was a modular dashboard that changed based on how someone actually used the card. All built inside Barclays' regulated financial design system, which is dense and compliance-heavy by necessity.

The widget structure mattered beyond just the launch. New benefits could be added later without redesigning the whole surface. That's what made it worth building as a system rather than a page.

Personalized Barclays cardholder dashboard

From strategy to live product.

JetBlue

Card acquisition experience

Teri's journey. The design established the strategic direction and interaction patterns for surfacing the card during the booking flow. JetBlue applied the concepts to a dedicated card acquisition page, implementing the themes and patterns rather than the designs directly.

Card acquisition, proposed versus shipped

Barclays

Personalized cardholder dashboard

Andy's and Lauren's journeys. Live in the Barclays cardholder experience, including bucket-list, points trajectory, mid-cycle payment, credit health, contextual credit limit increase, and benefits-in-context patterns.

Barclays

Loyalty journey extensions

Lauren's destination experience, on-trip point utilization, and post-trip summary patterns. Delivered by the broader IBM team; I contributed to research synthesis and review.

Reflection

Most of the design decisions came down to which surface owned which moment, and what that moment owed the person in it. Answering that question per surface is what kept two design systems feeling like one product.

Strategy starts with which product, which goal, which cardmember.

We weren't able to access post-launch data for this engagement. If we had, the two numbers I'd look at first are card application rate from inside the booking flow (compared against the baseline checkout upsell) and widget interaction rate by cardmember segment on the Barclays side. The one guardrail on both: JetBlue's core booking completion rate couldn't drop.

A year later

In 2023, the JetBlue Plus Card was named the #1 co-branded airline credit card in J.D. Power's U.S. Credit Card Satisfaction Study, ranking highest in Rewards Earning, Rewards Redeeming, and Benefits. The redesign isn't the only reason it won, but the work was live, and the categories it ranked highest in are the ones this project was aimed at.

Read the J.D. Power study