American Express

About the Project

For most of 2017 and part of 2018, I worked through a remote consultancy, Greenstone, on two projects with American Express: The Card Shop experience team & an Agile Marketing Pilot team. 

Challenge:

After offering superior Membership Services for over 150 years, American Express found itself in a shifting acquisition landscape where Credit Karma and The Points Guy (affiliates) are converting leads into customers better than they are. 

Prospective customers who come into the Card Detail pages either from external channels or passive navigation, demonstrate very high bounce rates and low submit rates. Mobile users in particular account for the highest visitation on average (400k per month), but also account for the highest bounce rate at 59.2%. This is the reality in which we began our partnership to optimize the Card Shop Experience. 

In addition to the Card Shop team, I was the UX lead along with a visual designer, copywriter and developer for the first agile marketing pilot at American Express. Following extensive training, our team worked directly w/ the product owner and internal stakeholders onsite to define, design, test & refine 52 tests over the course of 30 weeks. The goal was to establish a cadence for design solutions to move through the approval channels so we could build, measure and learn at an accelerated pace. 

My role:

• Product Strategy
  
• Experience Design
• Visual Design
• Voice & Tone
• User research, analysis & testing
• Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
• Agile Methodology

Build. Measure. Learn.

Agile methodology and Lean UX principles were used across both teams to garner results and allow us to adapt quickly. The stages of our design process included: 

• Audit existing responsive web and native mobile applications
  
• Review analytics & customer support chat logs to unveil unexpected pain points
• Developing Prospect-Centric features, by utilizing research to focus on what it means to be an AmEx card member
  
• Tailored user testing process including development of moderator guides and user flows for in-person testing as well as live site testing 
  
• Externalizing work with use of sticky notes/war room, virtual whiteboard program (real time board), collaboration tools, Google docs & InVision prototypes

The Assignment

Incrementally build upon the existing platform capabilities to aggressively optimize and personalize the Card Shop Experience for a multichannel audience that boosts conversion. The agile pilot team focused on speed & conversion through a daily cascade of experiments, testing our way into bigger evidence-based thinking.

Sprint Cadence

The UX process for the Card Shop team was a little different than previous projects I've worked on. Our small team tackled specific incremental design tasks over a two week period/sprint. Depending on the exact challenge, the outputs would incorporate some combination of user stories, strategic mapping, rapid iterative sketching, wireframes, refined visual design + copy, motions tests and prototyping.

At the end of each sprint, some design solutions may be shippable and move direct to build, while others may move into a clean-up, production or testing sprint. For the mobile 'above the fold' sprint, our goal was to prepare designed prototypes for usability testing in NYC and Chicago.

Armed with insights and strategic alignment coming out of the research and strategy sprints, we embarked on a series of rapid design sprints to craft the best solutions to our identified opportunities. We worked through UX and Visual Design in lock-step in order to hit our deadline and move into user testing as quickly as possible.

User Testing

We used a third-party vendor (GFK) to test our prototypes with users in both NYC and Chicago. In preparation for this, I created several documents including:

• Target Audience Screener
• Moderator Guide
• Prototype Flow Guide
• Key Quotes & Analysis Doc

What have I learned from these projects?

• Speed is greater than perfection —  This was the most important learning from both the card shop and agile pilot teams. To create the best product for our users, we couldn't be afraid to fail fast. My Card Shop teammates had a harder time adapting to the agile way of working as they were all remote and not as familiar w/ the process. As I was on both teams and in the war room at AmEx, I tried to be the bridge that synced the process & learnings to better accomplish our shared goals.
• From battle-tested experiments to scalable frameworks —  The learnings we garnered from many months and tests with AmEx have uniquely equipped me to develop systems and frameworks that underpin countless design experiments and set the course for a larger vision for the Card Shop experience. 
• Leveraging what was learned —  When our team embarked on this project, an Agile Process in the Marketing Team was strictly philosophy, no one really knew how it would actually function. Over the course of 10 months, the agile design process we've helped actualize has proven that it's the fastest way to results-driven innovation. I'm proud of my part in that win.