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Lead UX Designer → Digital Product Manager, Design Ops · Southwest Airlines

My Account Redesign

4 minutes read2022–2023Web · southwest.comLead UX Designer → Digital Product Manager, Design Ops
My Account Redesign — Hero Image

The My Account section of southwest.com is where Rapid Rewards members manage their loyalty relationship with the airline — points balances, travel history, credit card status, and account preferences. The redesign was one of Heart DS's first major real-world adoptions, and it became the proving ground for a number of system hypotheticals that hadn't yet been tested in production.

Context

My Account had historically been one of the more fragmented areas of the site — pages that had grown organically over time, each with their own visual logic, with limited coherence across the section. It was also one of the most strategically important: logged-in members are Southwest's highest-value customers, and the account experience directly influences engagement and satisfaction.

Image — Context

Evolving role mid-project

I came onto this project as Lead UX Designer and was promoted to Digital Product Manager, Design Ops mid-engagement. As the role shifted, I transitioned design ownership to the team and moved into a product management and oversight capacity — helping connect the design work to system goals and ensuring a clean handoff as the project moved toward delivery.

Image — Evolving role mid-project

First major HDS consumer

This project was among the first to adopt Heart DS at the component level in production. That meant working through how the system translated to a logged-in, data-dense context — member dashboards, account tables, status indicators, and dynamic content blocks. The adoption surfaced meaningful gaps in HDS that were subsequently closed, validating the system-building effort in a concrete way.

Image — First major HDS consumer

Outcome

The redesigned My Account experience established a more coherent, system-backed foundation for the section and confirmed that Heart DS could hold up in a complex, authenticated product context. For the design system, it was an important proof point: the components and patterns the team had built actually worked under production conditions.

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