AAA Connect+
Connect+ is AAA's internal platform used by back-office teams to manage customer memberships, payments, and account data. It handles thousands of interactions a day across regional offices, and when it doesn't work well, staff feel it immediately.
ROLE
PROBLEM
The platform had grown over years without real UX ownership. Staff were navigating a fragmented system that slowed down routine tasks, caused errors, and pushed people toward workarounds that weren't documented anywhere. Getting new employees up to speed was slow and expensive.
RESULTS
New staff reached working proficiency faster.
Common membership tasks got quicker and less error-prone.
Support escalations dropped.
The team stopped relying on workarounds and could finally onboard people without leaning on tribal knowledge.
The Challenge
Years of feature additions with no design oversight had taken their toll. Core membership tasks were split across disconnected screens, data views were dense and hard to scan, and patterns were inconsistent enough that new staff had to rely on colleagues rather than the interface itself. There was no shared component language either, so extending the system just created more inconsistency.
My Role & Approach
I led design end-to-end, embedded in agile sprints alongside PMs, developers, and business stakeholders. Before touching any UI, I ran discovery workshops with back-office staff to understand how they actually worked and where the friction was worst.
A lot of the work came down to simplification. The primary membership flows, creation, payment processing, upgrades, had accumulated unnecessary steps over time. I cut them back, clarified the decision points that were causing errors, and restructured the information hierarchies so staff could scan rather than read through everything.
In parallel I built out a multi-tier design system (primitive, semantic, component variables) that gave the platform a consistent language for the first time. That made handoff cleaner and future development more predictable. Throughout all of it, I kept real users in the loop, running usability sessions to catch issues before they became problems in production.
Outcome
Connect+ went from something people worked around to something they could rely on. Onboarding got faster, errors dropped, and routine tasks took noticeably less time. The design system also gave AAA a foundation to keep building on without accumulating more debt.