Rewarding Healthy Behaviors for Loyalty Customers and Patients.
My role : Product designer, Research and Customer experience strategy on CVS Health app
The Opportunity
As a Senior Product Designer at CVS Health, I focus on creating digital experiences that empower users to take control of their well-being. With CVS Health’s unique position as a trusted leader in health and wellness, we had a significant opportunity to bridge the gap between everyday health habits and meaningful rewards, encouraging millions of CarePass members to make healthier choices.
The Health Rewards Experience was a new, user-centered feature within the CVS Health App, designed to motivate and engage members by allowing them to track their health activities—such as steps, hydration, and exercise—while earning rewards for meeting goals and completing challenges. By integrating behavioral incentives with personalized insights, this feature aligns with CVS Health’s mission to make healthcare more accessible, rewarding, and engaging for both loyalty members and patients.
I led a strategic, user-centered design process, collaborating closely with cross-disciplinary teams, including marketing, research, and analytics. From user research and competitive analysis to interaction design and testing, I crafted a seamless, intuitive interface that not only aligns with business objectives but also encourages sustained engagement and long-term health improvements.
The Approach
Leveraging the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework for user-centered innovation is essential to designing meaningful, impactful experiences. For this project, we applied JTBD—a proven methodology—to uncover what users are trying to achieve, how they perceive challenges, and what success looks like from their perspective. This approach allowed us to move beyond surface-level preferences and align product decisions with real-world user behavior.
Why Jobs to Be Done?
Traditional research often focuses on demographics and broad assumptions, but JTBD shifts the focus to what users actually need to get done. This methodology provided three key insights that guided our product strategy:
Clarity on user behaviors – Understanding what tasks users actually perform to achieve their health and wellness goals.
Prioritization based on difficulty – Identifying pain points that create friction in program participation and engagement.
User-defined success criteria – Establishing measurable outcomes that drive feature innovation and iteration.
By utilizing Outcome-Driven Innovation—a methodology with a 5x higher success rate in new product adoption—we could ensure that our Health Rewards experience was designed to maximize engagement, ease-of-use, and long-term value for CVS Health customers.
Key Insights & Design Opportunities
Our JTBD research uncovered three major friction points in the existing experience:
Program Sign-Up & Participation – Users struggled to enroll and understand how the program worked.
Progress Tracking – There was a strong demand for clearer, real-time tracking of health activities and earned rewards.
Program Awareness & Understanding – Many users were unaware of the program or confused about its benefits.
These findings shaped our design and strategic decisions, leading to tangible improvements in the digital experience, including:
Enhanced Awareness – Improved in-app onboarding, targeted marketing, and educational resources to boost program visibility.
Simplified Experience – Streamlined enrollment and clearer, digestible program rules to reduce cognitive load.
Better Progress Tracking – Introduced real-time tracking features for health activities, rewards, and milestones.
Personalized Digital Support – Added multiple tracking options to accommodate different user preferences and devices.
By directly addressing the most difficult user outcomes—such as increasing reward clarity, reducing wait times for incentives, and making wellness tasks more relevant—we ensured that our Health Rewards experience not only met user expectations but exceeded them.
This JTBD-driven approach created a scalable, user-centered solution that reinforces CVS Health’s role as a trusted leader in health and wellness, helping millions of loyalty members and patients stay engaged, track their progress, and achieve their wellness goals—all within the CVS Health app.
Design Challenge
With a clear understanding of user pain points, expectations, and technological constraints, we began by mapping out user flows and wireframes to assess the usability of the new system requirements. From there, I expanded the Loyalty Program’s visual language, voice, and tone to ensure a cohesive and seamless in-app experience.
Design Study
User Experience Study: Key Insights & Design Outcomes
Our unmoderated usability study tested the Healthy Rewards activation experience with nine CVS customers, including participants with disabilities and those who had not engaged with CVS in the past six months. Spanning an audience aged 24-65, the study aimed to evaluate the ease of use, clarity, and excitement around the new feature.
Key Findings & Design Impact
High Enthusiasm & Adoption – All 9 out of 9 participants responded positively, expressing excitement about the feature.
Smooth Activation Process – Most users found it easy to activate rewards and connect a fitness tracker.
Clarity in Experience – Participants navigated selecting activity types, tracking progress, and redeeming rewards with ease.
Design Outcomes
Streamlined Activation Flow – Ensuring a frictionless onboarding process to encourage adoption.
Enhanced Tracker Integration – Refining connectivity with fitness apps like Apple Health for seamless syncing.
Clearer Progress Indicators – Strengthening visual cues for in-progress and completed challenges to keep users engaged.
Intuitive Rewards Redemption – Optimizing the ExtraCare integration for a hassle-free redemption experience.
These insights directly informed design refinements, ensuring a seamless, engaging, and rewarding experience for CVS customers.
Looking Forward
Following the successful launch of the pilot program to 10% of loyalty members, we saw strong adoption, increased engagement, and positive feedback, validating our approach to designing user-centered health experiences. By leveraging the Jobs to Be Done framework, we were able to remove friction points, simplify participation, and enhance real-time tracking, making it easier for members to stay engaged in their wellness journey. Now, we are applying these same human-centered design principles to patient journeys, ensuring that our digital solutions support not just rewards-based engagement but holistic health and wellness. By integrating personalized tracking, intuitive support systems, and clear pathways to better health, we continue to strengthen CVS Health’s role as a trusted partner in proactive care.