Affinity Hub
Affinity Hub is RAPP's proprietary AI-powered platform that transforms static customer journey mapping into a live, always-on intelligence and activation system. It centralizes behavioral research, data science, and AI-driven opportunity modeling into a single workspace, enabling strategists and clients to move from insight to activation faster and with more precision than traditional approaches.
The platform spans the full marketing lifecycle: journey planning, audience intelligence, opportunity identification and scoring, AI-assisted briefing, content generation, and channel activation — all connected under one system.
COMPANY
RAPP (Omnicom)
Role
Lead UX Designer
Timeline
Late 2025 – Present
Tools
Figma, Miro, Lovable, Claude
background
Journey mapping has been a core RAPP capability for years — but the output was always a static artifact. A beautifully crafted deliverable that lived in a deck, got presented once, and went untouched.
The vision for Affinity Hub was to change that: make journey intelligence continuous, queryable, and directly connected to activation. A strategist's operating system, not a slide.
When the project came to me, a prior design direction existed but hadn't landed. Leadership wanted a redesign — new design system, new architecture, new interaction model — built to scale with a platform that was growing fast.
1
Define: Problem Scope
Before touching a frame, I needed to understand what the product was actually trying to solve — not just for end users, but for the business.
Three core problems emerged:
Static outputs
Traditional journey maps are snapshots. By the time they're presented, the data they're built on is already aging. Strategists needed something that updated as customer behavior evolved.
Siloed intelligence
Research, data science, and activation lived in separate tools and teams. There was no single place where qualitative insight, quantitative signals, and content performance could be seen together.
Insight without activation
Even when good insight existed, the path from "we know this about the customer" to "here's the brief, here's the content, here's the channel plan" was entirely manual and slow.
The redesign had to address all three — not just visually, but systemically.
2
Prioritize: Use Cases & Users
The platform had to serve multiple user types with very different needs. I mapped the primary roles:
The Strategist
needs to explore journey data quickly, identify high-impact moments, and generate briefing materials without leaving the platform.
The Client / Senior Stakeholder
needs a clear, confidence-inspiring view of the journey and the opportunities it surfaces. Doesn't want to dig through raw data.
The Activation Team
needs outputs that connect directly to channel planning and content execution without reformatting everything manually.
From these, we defined a use case priority stack that shaped what got designed first and what could wait. The core loop — explore journey → identify opportunity → generate brief → activate — became the backbone of the product architecture.
3
Information Architecture & Workflows
With scope defined, I mapped the full system — modules, navigation hierarchy, data relationships, and the progressive disclosure logic that would keep a complex platform from feeling overwhelming.
I broke down the primary user workflows end-to-end before touching visual design, using these as the test cases for every decision that followed.
4
Design System
One of the first things I built was the design system — there wasn't one. Color, typography, components, interaction states, iconography — all defined from scratch in Figma, structured for a dev team working in parallel.
Getting this right early meant every screen that followed was consistent, and handoff didn't require re-explaining the basics every time.
5
Low to High Fidelity
From wireframes through hi-fidelity, I designed across the full platform: the interactive journey visualization, insight panels, opportunity modeling, AI-assisted briefing, and content activation flows. Switching between Figma, Lovable and Claude, I build and test interactions throughout the entire process to make sure everything is pixel perfect. Stakeholder reviews with executive leadership and working sessions with strategists also ran throughout - shaping decisions on navigation, information hierarchy, and where the AI layer should and shouldn't be visible.
6
Dev Handoff
Handoff was rolling, not a single delivery. As modules cleared review they went straight to engineering, with annotated specs, component documentation, and edge case definitions. I stayed embedded through build, reviewing implementations and resolving gaps as they emerged in code.
Outcome
In 2026, Affinity Hub was presented publicly for the first time at Adobe Summit — one of the largest marketing technology conferences in the world — by RAPP's Global Chief Strategy Officer. For a platform still in active development, it was a meaningful moment: the design was production-ready enough to represent the company publicly.
RAPP's Global Chief Strategy Officer
Shiona McDougall at 2026 Adobe Summit
Click to see the full video
Affinity Hub is now in active development with client pilots underway across multiple accounts. What started as an internal platform concept has been repositioned as a commercial product — a new line of business for RAPP that redefines what a marketing company can offer its clients.