Assessing the Competitive Landscape

The rewards redemption space includes several competitors, but we know consumers aren’t just comparing ampliFI’s rewards portal with other financial websites: Tandem’s product design team dove in to glean best practices from Amazon, Starbucks, Nike, and other consumer giants. By looking outside the industry for benchmarks, we ensured that consumers will get the same high-quality, intuitive experience that they expect from all retail websites.

Reducing Friction with Journey Maps

Working in partnership with ampliFI’s IT team, it became apparent that users were frustrated by the bottlenecks they had to navigate before they could redeem their rewards. To combat that friction, the Tandem team added ways for users to navigate more smoothly from their financial institutions’ homepages directly to the most popular rewards, including cash back. Previously, account holders had to access an online catalog, select “cash back,” and navigate to a checkout page. Now, users can access cash back directly and skip the checkout. Tandem’s software engineers collaborated with the ampliFI development team on API design for 30+ endpoints

User Experience and User Interface

Influenced by our findings from user research, Tandem’s team produced a modern, easily customizable user interface, including features like toggles that can be turned on or off per financial institution based on their offerings and color palette. We established current and future state site maps that evolved with the project and delivered wireframes that brought the design and architecture to a new level — while shaping the timeline and scope.