Project Overview
- Company: Comenity
- Industry: Financial Services, Credit Cards
- Project Type: White-Labeled UX, ADA Compliance, Financial UX
- Timeframe: April 2021 – January 2022
Project Context
Imagine you’re a white-label credit card company with dozens of retail brand clients. Each client wants a customized experience—something tailored to their brand’s look, rewards program, and customer needs. At first, this approach seems like a great way to stand out and strengthen client relationships.
But over time, these customizations start to pile up. A small tweak here, an added feature there, and suddenly, your platform has become a tangled mess of inconsistencies.
- Internal teams are struggling—constant bug fixes, regulatory hurdles, and a backlog of custom requests slow everything down.
- Sales teams go rogue, selling features that don’t exist or aren’t scalable, causing delays in onboarding new brands.
- Customer service calls skyrocket as users find it hard to navigate the disjointed payment experience.
This isn’t just an inconvenience—it’s a scalability problem that needs solving before it affects revenue, compliance, and reputation.
I was brought in to help untangle the complexity—to create a scalable UX framework that worked across 50+ brands while ensuring the platform was accessible, compliant, and user-friendly.
I wasn’t just designing screens—I was acting as the diplomat between clients, users, customer service teams, and internal stakeholders. My role was to bring alignment, uncover pain points, and translate strategic decisions into a cohesive, highly detailed, and accessible user experience.
The Challenge / Opportunity
The Problem
Comenity’s credit card portals had evolved into a disconnected patchwork of inconsistent experiences. Each brand had different payment flows, navigation patterns, and branding customizations, which led to:
- Confusing user experiences that resulted in frustrated customers and increased service calls.
- ADA compliance gaps, making accessibility a major risk.
- Scalability issues, making it difficult to onboard new clients quickly.
The Goal
- Create a scalable white-label framework—so every brand could have a unique, but structurally consistent experience.
- Streamline the payment experience to reduce friction and improve usability.
- Ensure ADA compliance across all portals.
Constraints
- 50+ different brands—each with their own rewards, branding, and custom requests.
- Regulatory compliance—ensuring legal requirements were met across various financial guidelines.
- Legacy systems—the platform had to integrate with older, complex back-end systems without disrupting service.
My Role & Team
Role: UX Lead
As the lead UX strategist, I was responsible for:
- ADA Compliance: Ensuring all experiences met accessibility standards.
- User Research: Gathering insights from 40+ stakeholders, including customer service teams and end users.
- White-Label UX Strategy: Designing scalable components that could be easily customized for different brands.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Acting as the bridge between design, development, compliance, and product teams.
This wasn’t just about building a better interface—it was about aligning teams, simplifying complex workflows, and future-proofing the system.
Process & Approach
User Research
Understanding the real pain points required more than just analyzing analytics—we needed to talk to real users.
Conducted 40+ user interviews with:
- Clients (brand stakeholders)
- Customer service teams (to identify recurring user issues)
- Cardholders (to test usability and pain points)
UX Process
- Mapped user pain points and prioritized high-impact improvements.
- Designed scalable UI components adaptable to different brand needs.
- Created task flows to ensure seamless payment experiences across brands.
Accessibility & Compliance
- Partnered with ADA compliance experts to ensure every screen, interaction, and form met legal accessibility standards.
- Created annotations & documentation to guide development on WCAG-compliant designs.
Testing & Validation
- Conducted moderated and unmoderated user testing to refine designs.
- Used A/B testing & analytics to validate changes before full implementation.
Solutions & Deliverables
Developed ADA-Compliant, Responsive Wireframes
Every aspect of the design was built with accessibility in mind, ensuring clear navigation, optimized color contrast, and assistive technology support.
Created a Component-Based Design System
The system allowed brands to customize their portals without breaking UX consistency, making onboarding new clients faster and smoother.
Streamlined the Payment Experience
Based on user research and competitive analysis, we simplified payment flows—reducing friction and making it easier for cardholders to view statements, pay balances, and manage accounts.
Results & Impact
- Higher accessibility compliance across all brand sites
- Simplified payment flows led to improved user satisfaction and fewer service calls
- Scalable UX framework enabled faster onboarding of new brands
By creating a repeatable, white-labeled UX system, we transformed a fragmented ecosystem into a seamless, scalable experience—benefiting Comenity, their clients, and their customers.
Key Learnings & Takeaways
- Scalable design systems are critical for multi-brand UX—ensuring flexibility while maintaining consistency.
- ADA compliance isn’t just a checkbox—it requires ongoing collaboration between UX, development, and legal teams.
- User research is invaluable—real user insights helped validate assumptions and streamline critical pain points.
Final Thoughts
This project wasn’t just about making a prettier UI—it was about reducing complexity, improving accessibility, and creating a system that would scale for years to come.
A well-designed UX strategy doesn’t just serve users—it solves business challenges, aligns teams, and reduces operational inefficiencies.