TELUS Rewards
TELUS Rewards was a high-performing national loyalty program with a growing catalogue of physical rewards, digital gift cards, contests, and exclusive member perks.
Agency
Architech
Role
Design Lead
Client
TELUS
Year
2021 - 2022
Its commercial success created a new challenge: the platform had evolved beyond the limits of its original design framework, making it increasingly difficult to scale new reward types, support promotional complexity, and respond to a growing backlog of customer and business needs.
The opportunity was not simply to refresh the interface, but to re-architect the experience so the program could continue to grow without losing clarity, flexibility, or operational efficiency. In a senior design leadership role, the work included modernizing the design foundation, improving critical redemption journeys, and creating a more systemized catalogue model that could support continued expansion.
Scaling a successful platform
One of the defining challenges of this work was that TELUS Rewards was already thriving. The design problem was not about rescuing an underperforming product, but about evolving a successful one whose underlying experience framework was no longer built for the volume and variety it now needed to support. The catalogue was becoming more dynamic, redemption scenarios were multiplying, and partner-led promotions introduced ongoing exceptions that the original system was not designed to handle.
The redesign therefore focused on future-proofing the platform. Rather than solving isolated screens, the work established a more resilient framework for how products, categories, promotions, and redemption states could be represented across the ecosystem. This made the experience easier for customers to understand while giving the business a more adaptable structure for growth.
Creating a flexible product system
A major part of the redesign centred on the catalogue and product card model. The platform needed to accommodate an unusually wide range of product types and statuses, including digital codes, physical shipments, contests, limited inventory, promotional flags, wishlisting, and a variety of calls to action. Instead of treating these as one-off design exceptions, the work established a systemized approach that could support hundreds of permutations across both page and card levels.
This was especially important because the product card had become one of the most strategically important components in the platform. It had to communicate value, availability, urgency, and next steps at a glance while remaining flexible enough to support changing merchandising and operational needs. Designing that system was not just a visual exercise; it was a structural solution to product complexity.
Redesigning the redemption experience
The redemption flow was another critical area of transformation. Customers needed to move through very different types of fulfilment journeys, from instant digital delivery to contest entry to physical shipping, each with its own rules, data requirements, and post-redemption history needs. The redesign created a more secure and satisfying experience that could accommodate these multiple pathways while improving continuity across the broader program.
This work also helped ensure that complex backend realities were expressed clearly in the customer-facing experience. Details such as shipping information, redemption history, and secure access to digital codes needed to feel coherent and trustworthy rather than fragmented. The result was a flow framework better suited to both customer expectations and operational scale.
Modernizing the design foundation
Alongside the customer experience improvements, the platform itself was modernized at the design operations level. The UI was moved from Sketch into Figma, aligned to a refreshed design system, and further systemized to support handoff, reuse, and long-term maintainability. Close collaboration with development also helped refine implementation details such as accessibility, templating, and subtle motion patterns.
This operational layer matters in a portfolio piece because it shows leadership beyond screens. The value was not only in the redesigned experience, but in creating a design foundation and delivery model that could keep pace with a living, fast-changing product.
“You are one of the best teams I have ever worked with, and I’ve worked with a lot of vendors.
It’s incredible to see the progress made on the program over the years.”
— Client for TELUS Rewards