Removing Barriers to Behavior: How Clarity Transformed a Pharmacy Rewards Experience
How simplifying value, language, and flow reshaped customer momentum and strengthened alignment across a national-scale rewards ecosystem.
Customers can now enroll in the pharmacy rewards experience from any entry point, creating one unified, frictionless flow. This design removes barriers to entry and allows customers to join seamlessly while completing related tasks.
The Challenge
The pharmacy rewards program was part of a large national loyalty ecosystem designed to help customers earn value through everyday health behaviors. While the business goal was to increase engagement and streamline enrollment, the customer experience was weighed down by complexity.
Enrollment required multiple disconnected steps across different parts of the ecosystem — creating friction that caused most customers to drop off before completing the process.
My Role & Leadership Scope
Director-level design leadership guiding a cross-functional team focused on simplifying a national pharmacy rewards experience. I partnered across business, product, engineering, user research, content, legal, and operations to bring alignment, clarify goals, and ground decisions in customer insight.
What We Found
By mapping the end-to-end journey, we uncovered a fundamental barrier: customers were being asked to complete several prerequisite tasks before they could join the rewards experience. This multi-step path created confusion, broke momentum, and made the value proposition difficult to understand.
To move forward, we needed to simplify the narrative, reduce the cognitive load, and shift from a system-centered process to a customer-centered one.
Mapping Enrollment Barriers Across the Rewards Journey
Revealing where effort outweighed motivation and caused customers to drop off.
To understand where motivation broke down, we mapped the end-to-end journey from intent to reward. The mapping revealed a series of dependent steps across multiple systems — each adding friction, cognitive load, and drop-off risk.
This visualization made the complexity visible and aligned teams around a single truth:
“The challenge wasn’t awareness or incentive; it was barriers to entry.
Our goal became to remove those barriers so customers could act while their motivation was high.”
Our Approach: Designing for Behavior
We grounded our work in behavioral design principles: people take action when value is immediate, clear, and contextual to what they’re already doing. To validate this, we reframed enrollment around real-world pharmacy moments where motivation was naturally highest.
Simplified the Value Narrative
The original experience relied on dense language and complex distinctions that made the benefit difficult to understand. We streamlined the narrative to be shorter, clearer, and more intuitive — reducing cognitive load and helping customers immediately recognize the value of joining.
Reduced Steps and Friction
We removed unnecessary prerequisites and brought enrollment closer to the moments when customers were already engaged. This eliminated multiple handoffs and allowed customers to complete the process within a single, cohesive flow.
Validated Through Behavioral Testing
Prototype testing confirmed the impact: clearer language and fewer steps significantly increased task completion, confidence, and comprehension — even with a small sample size. These insights helped secure alignment across cross-functional stakeholders and reinforced the case for simplification at scale.
Measured Impact
“Removing friction doesn’t just simplify a flow — it unlocks behavior at scale.”
Within days of launch, we saw a substantial increase in customer engagement as people were able to act in the moment of value. With the enrollment experience embedded directly into natural pharmacy touchpoints, customers no longer needed to navigate multiple disconnected steps to participate.
Beyond the Numbers
These results reinforced a simple truth: customers don’t need more incentives — they need fewer obstacles. When the experience aligns with intent and value is presented clearly, engagement increases naturally.
Key Outcomes
A significant uplift in enrollments immediately after launch
Higher task completion as customers moved through a clearer, shorter flow
Improved comprehension of program value through streamlined language
Stronger alignment across cross-functional partners on the simplified model
“Removing friction didn’t just streamline the experience — it revealed how much latent intent already existed within the customer base.”
What We Uncovered
The shift to dual enrollment surfaced a new behavioral segment — pharmacy-first users who were engaging with CVS digitally for the first time.
Unlike traditional ExtraCare members, they entered through the pharmacy experience and had no context for how loyalty or rewards extended across ecosystems.
They lacked onboarding tailored to their perspective and were unsure how to use or redeem rewards once earned.
This discovery reframed our next opportunity: designing an experience that welcomes pharmacy-first customers into the broader CVS ecosystem.
I proposed a journey-mapping initiative to understand their mindset, needs, and value triggers — turning an unexpected gap into the next design evolution.
Leadership Pivot & Key Lesson
As we moved through development, leadership introduced a new strategic priority that shifted the direction of the rewards tracker. While our team had explored simplified visual approaches to improve clarity, leadership emphasized a different lens — one that highlighted broader engagement patterns across customer groups.
Rather than focusing on a single visualization style, the team evaluated multiple concepts that expressed progress, value, and motivation in different ways. Each option carried tradeoffs in clarity, emphasis, and cognitive load.
This pivot reinforced a lasting leadership insight: Design at scale requires adaptability.
Priorities evolve. New information emerges. Strategic alignment sometimes means shifting direction while continuing to advocate for customer clarity and maintaining the integrity of the experience.
It became a defining example of balancing customer intent, organizational goals, and design judgment — a core competency in leading design within complex, enterprise environments.
What I Learned
Design leadership extends beyond screens and flows — it sits at the intersection of systems, people, and language. This project reinforced several truths I return to often:
Behavior change starts with access, not persuasion.
When people can act in the moment of value, motivation accelerates naturally.Removing friction unlocks momentum.
Simplification is often the fastest path to meaningful outcomes.Clarity amplifies impact.
Clear communication — across teams, journeys, and value propositions — aligns decisions and speeds execution.
Connected Insight
This work also surfaced underlying complexity in processes, terminology, and system dependencies — a form of organizational friction often understood as “tech debt.” I explored this further in my Medium article, “Rethinking Tech Debt: The Business Strategy Leaders Can’t Ignore.”
Together, these threads reinforce a core principle of my practice:
When you remove barriers and clarify intent, you create the conditions for both human and business change at scale.