Smarter shopping, measurable growth

Making Deals Easier to Find

Background

Ebates, now rebranded as Rakuten Rewards, is a cashback platform that allows users to earn money back when shopping through partner retailers. Despite its popularity, the platform faced growing usability challenges as the user base and service offerings expanded.

Objective

Redesign and relaunch the entire platform to:

Target User

Online shoppers looking for cashback opportunities, personalized offers, and trustworthy deal information across a wide range of retailers.

My Role

I was the sole designer on this cross-functional relaunch project. My responsibilities included:

Problem Statement

Design Solutions

Design Impact

Reflection

This project highlighted the value of cross-functional collaboration, especially when working with compliance and content teams across regions. What seemed like simple UI tasks revealed unexpected complexity and required alignment beyond design.

I also learned how internal systems are just as important as user-facing features. By improving team operations, we created more time and space to focus on high-impact user experience work. This reinforced that great design supports not just users, but the people building and delivering it too.

Up next: another project you might like!

Fixing Support Portal Pain Points

Smarter shopping, measurable growth

Making Deals Easier to Find

Background Ebates, now rebranded as Rakuten Rewards, is a cashback platform that allows users to earn money back when shopping through partner retailers. Despite its popularity, the platform faced growing usability challenges as the user base and service offerings expanded.

Objective​

Redesign and relaunch the entire platform to:

​

Improve navigation and content discoverability

Increase user engagement through targeted experiences

Streamline internal operations for greater efficiency

Target User

Online shoppers looking for cashback opportunities, personalized offers, and trustworthy deal information across a wide range of retailers.

My Role I was the sole designer on this cross-functional relaunch project. My responsibilities included:

Leading UX and product design from discovery to delivery

Collaborating daily with PMs, marketers, and engineers

Defining design strategy and optimizing internal workflows

Problem Statement

Unintuitive navigation made it difficult for users to access key services

Users had to manually search for generic deals within broad categories

Low content discoverability led to missed opportunities and poor visibility of offers

Lack of targeted and engaging content resulted in weak user engagement and low return visits

Manual, repetitive workflows for marketing tasks slowed down execution and reduced team efficiency

Design Solutions

​

Enhanced Brand & Deal Discovery Redesigned core navigation and category structure to help users find relevant brands and offers more easily.

Community and Loyalty Features Introduced user-driven content like shared deals, reviews, and a forum to encourage engagement and repeat visits.

Workflow Automation Built internal tools and templates to automate repetitive tasks such as banner generation, campaign pages, and marketing emails.

Design Impact​

Increased repeat visits by 25 percent through improved community and loyalty-driven features

Boosted internal workflow speed by 66 percent by automating content and asset creation​

Improved overall sprint productivity by more than 70 percent without increasing team size

Enhanced content discoverability, leading to a smoother and more personalized shopping experience

Reflection This project highlighted the value of cross-functional collaboration, especially when working with compliance and content teams across regions. What seemed like simple UI tasks revealed unexpected complexity and required alignment beyond design.

I also learned how internal systems are just as important as user-facing features. By improving team operations, we created more time and space to focus on high-impact user experience work. This reinforced that great design supports not just users, but the people building and delivering it too.

Up next: another project you might like!

Fixing Support Portal Pain Points

Background

Ebates, now rebranded as Rakuten Rewards, is a cashback platform that allows users to earn money back when shopping through partner retailers. Despite its popularity, the platform faced growing usability challenges as the user base and service offerings expanded.

Objective

My Role

I was the sole designer on this cross-functional relaunch project. My responsibilities included:

Enhanced Brand & Deal Discovery
Redesigned core navigation and category structure to help users find relevant brands and offers more easily.

Community and Loyalty Features
Introduced user-driven content like shared deals, reviews, and a forum to encourage engagement and repeat visits.

Workflow Automation
Built internal tools and templates to automate repetitive tasks such as banner generation, campaign pages, and marketing emails.

Design Impact

Boosted internal workflow speed by 66 percent by automating content and asset creation

Reflection

This project highlighted the value of cross-functional collaboration, especially when working with compliance and content teams across regions. What seemed like simple UI tasks revealed unexpected complexity and required alignment beyond design.