Designing Clarity in a Complex Rewards Space
Cheddar was CommBank’s greenfield experiment in the crowded cashback and rewards space. My role was to design the end-to-end experience, from discovery to cash-out, while working around transaction data constraints and building user trust.
The challenge was how to create a product that felt simple and exciting even though the underlying merchant data was fragmented and complex.
When Complexity Undermines Trust
Data Gaps Break Trust
Behind every cashback product lies a web of transaction data and for Cheddar that data was often patchy. Visa and Mastercard only passed through limited merchant information, meaning the app sometimes knew a purchase happened but not exactly where. For users, this lack of clarity risked feeling like a broken promise.
Complex Merchant Rules Create Friction
Each retail partner wanted its own version of an offer. Some gave 10% off the first order, others 3% on select items, and a few only counted purchases above a threshold. These differences may have worked for merchants, but for customers they introduced friction. Instead of one consistent experience, users had to parse a maze of terms and conditions.
Unclear Cashback Status Leads to Churn
The biggest risk was the gap between expectation and reality. Customers wanted instant rewards, yet transactions took days — sometimes weeks — to confirm. Without a transparent way to show pending and confirmed states, users were left asking “Where’s my money?” and often leaving before the app could deliver on its promise.
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Rewards only matter if people can see and trust them. Otherwise, they feel like empty promises.
Designing Transparency That Builds Trust
Making the Invisible Visible
We explored ways to show pending rewards and transaction progress in a clear, user-friendly format.
Turning Confusion Into Clarity
Wireframes tested how plain language and simplified states could replace back-end complexity.
Designing for Trust at Every Step
The goal was to reassure users with consistent feedback whenever they shopped and earned.
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Design is about translating messy back-end logic into something users feel confident and excited about.
Designing a Rewarding Journey
Building Confidence Through Structure
With clarity in place, the next challenge was hierarchy. We refined the layout so earnings were always visible at the top of the screen. Pending, confirmed, and available amounts were grouped into a clean tracker that reduced the need for extra explanation.
Celebrating Every Milestone
We wanted the experience to feel rewarding before the cash-out stage. Small design moments such as confetti bursts when cashback moved from pending to confirmed gave users a sense of progress and achievement along the way.
From Transaction to Triumph
The full journey was mapped as a sequence: shop, see a pending reward, watch it confirm, and celebrate the payout. Each step became an opportunity to reassure and motivate, turning a dry financial process into an engaging user story.
The final product balanced clarity, delight, and scalability.
A reward tracker dashboard that surfaced total cashback at a glance. Users could always see how much was pending, confirmed, and available.
Merchant offer pages that explained terms in plain language while keeping design consistent.
A cash-out experience that felt celebratory, complete with animation, confetti, and positive reinforcement.
A flexible design system that handled many different merchant rules without breaking the UI
This solution bridged the gap between messy data and user trust. By turning complexity into a simple and rewarding experience, Cheddar gained credibility in a crowded market.
Impacts
Cheddar’s launch attracted thousands of early adopters who quickly engaged with the product. Feedback confirmed that the transparent tracker and celebratory design moments created trust and made cashback feel real.
The design system streamlined the onboarding of new merchants, allowing the product team to scale partnerships faster than expected. Even though external business factors shaped Cheddar’s future, the design outcomes showed that clarity and delight are powerful drivers of adoption in financial products.
The project highlighted an important principle: in fintech, usability alone is not enough. Users need to feel reassured and rewarded at every step in order to stay engaged.
