This portfolio is a work in progress
Role: Senior Product Designer, Virgin
Designing a loyalty platform across 60+ Virgin brands
Creating a unified rewards experience across independent businesses
Virgin Red was a new loyalty platform designed to bring together more than 60 independent Virgin companies into a single rewards ecosystem. Customers could earn and spend points across travel, health, media, banking and other Virgin services, encouraging engagement across the wider Virgin Group.
690k
Subscribers
£14m
Annual sales
The challenge
Each Virgin company operated independently, with its own customer accounts, systems and data structures. The challenge was to create a loyalty experience that felt like a single product while supporting a wide range of customer scenarios behind the scenes. Key challenges included:
Connecting customers from multiple Virgin businesses
Supporting different account ownership scenarios
Creating a unified sign-up experience across disconnected systems
Designing a scalable reward catalogue
Supporting multiple redemption journeys and partner requirements
Creating consistency without forcing every partner into the same model
The customer experience needed to feel seamless, even though the underlying systems were anything but.
The approach
I worked on the design of the platform from the ground up, helping define onboarding, partner integration and reward redemption experiences for a highly complex ecosystem of brands and customer types.
Designing a unified onboarding model
One of the biggest challenges was registration.
Customers could arrive from different combinations of Virgin companies. Some customers already held accounts with multiple Virgin brands, while others were completely new to the ecosystem.
Working closely with the Director of Architecture, I helped map relationships between Virgin companies and identify how customer information could be connected behind the scenes.
This resulted in the creation of 12 onboarding use cases, covering different customer scenarios and defining how data would move between systems while maintaining a simple experience for users.
The goal was to hide the complexity and present registration as a single coherent journey.
Validating onboarding journeys
Once the integration model had been defined, multiple approaches to onboarding were explored and tested.
Two alternative registration patterns were developed:
Step-by-step modular journeys
Full-page form experiences
Moderated testing with 16 participants helped identify areas of confusion and inform future iterations.
Feedback from these sessions directly influenced subsequent revisions to both flow structure and interface design.
Creating a scalable rewards catalogue
The rewards platform needed to support a large variety of offers while helping customers find rewards relevant to them.
An open card sort helped uncover how customers naturally grouped and searched for rewards. Findings showed strong demand for:
Filtering and sorting
Clear categorisation
Visibility of available rewards
Understanding what could be unlocked with additional points
These insights informed the structure of the catalogue and the way rewards were presented throughout the experience.
Designing consistent redemption journeys
Each reward partner had different redemption requirements, creating a challenge for consistency.
To address this, I mapped multiple redemption scenarios and developed reusable journey patterns that could flex to accommodate partner-specific needs while maintaining a coherent overall experience.
The resulting framework covered:
Reward discovery
Reward redemption
Promotional code activation
Voucher management
Order tracking
Saved rewards
This created a more predictable experience for customers while supporting a broad range of partner requirements.
Testing the end-to-end proposition
A 97-screen interactive prototype was developed to validate the experience before implementation.
Research with 275 participants tested key tasks including:
Redeeming promotional codes
Using rewards
Finding saved vouchers
Navigating reward management
The testing confirmed that customers could successfully complete key loyalty tasks while highlighting opportunities to improve discoverability and navigation in later iterations.
The impact
The work established the foundations for a loyalty platform connecting more than 60 Virgin businesses through a shared rewards ecosystem.
Platform impact
Created onboarding journeys capable of supporting multiple customer and account scenarios
Defined 12 integration use cases across Virgin brands
Established scalable patterns for partner onboarding and reward redemption
Created a flexible framework capable of supporting multiple partner requirements
Design impact
Created a consistent experience across multiple brands and partners
Simplified complex backend integrations into customer-friendly journeys
Established reusable patterns for future loyalty experiences