“DON’T LIVE LIFE WITHOUT IT”
The credit card that everyone wants and knows to be the gold standard of status.
OVERVIEW
PROJECT American Express (International Card Shop)
TIMEFRAME Sept 2017 - Aug 2018
ROLE Lead UX / UI Designer
TOOLS Sketch / Photoshop / InVision
During my time at American Express, I was the lead UX designer for several international markets (UK, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Germany, Canada and etc). Not only did I handle international accounts, but I also assisted the US market as well. For a big company like Amex, it was a huge task considering they were going through changes at the time such as branding and leadership. My task was to work with account managers from all over the world, designers, strategists and developers to improve the experience of signing up for a credit card, to design a content management system (CMS), and to unify the voice of what American Express wanted to portray to their customers by creating the foundations of a solid design system that Amex will be able to use through their entire digital space.
I was a lone wolf designer on the international team and for me, it was a good thing because I was able to own every design choice for the international space. UX was an unfamiliar trade in my team when I arrived so it was a privilege to be able to conduct small workshops with my team on educating them on how we, as a team, should approach finding solutions for Amex’s card shop pages.
Along with collaborating with other designers and marketers, I worked alongside an agency, Code and Theory, when consulting for the Platinum Card page. As many already know, the Platinum Credit Card is metal and has more of a premium feel. We wanted people to see that as well when visiting the website. I was trusted with speaking to their UX designer and account manager so that Amex’s brand didn’t get lost with whatever C+T wanted to do. While I, myself appreciate a creative solution, there were strict guidelines in place that didn’t allow some designs to express itself when it comes to a financial webpage. Overall, my experience with American Express has been nothing but great. It allowed me to grow, take leadership and responsibility, find new ways of being creative in a rather “boring” environment, and learn a bit more about how the credit card/finance world works.
GOALS
Improve the UX and UI of the card shop pages for various international markets and the US market.
Create a CMS product for internal use.
Work alongside colleagues to conceptualize and produce an experience that will drive higher conversion rates for all international products.
Collaborate with outside agency to give the Platinum Card page a special “premium” look.
DELIVERABLES
Annotated redesigns for featured card shop pages, card details pages, certain form pages and various “pieces or elements.”
Working prototypes for card pages to show user journey.
User journey map and working prototype for internal CMS product.
Standardized Design Language to use for webpages.
RESEARCH: WHAT ARE WE TRYING TO DO?
Before designing anything, it’s important to do some research on who the customer is. Luckily, American Express has a research team fully dedicated to finding out how the customer feels and interacts with the web pages that need an uplift. I aligned with this team (based in the UK) frequently to understand American Express’ customers and used the data to redesign multiple pages. They held user interviews with credit card holders testing out new features of the website, for desktop and mobile, and using their responses, we collectively gathered the information so that design decisions could be made.
FEATURE IDEATION: THIS GOES IN, THAT GOES OUT
Based on research data, certain features were brainstormed with product owners to see what would benefit the customers in helping them to choose the right credit card. After coming up with a list of ideas, I used a prioritization matrix to quickly see what was doable with the time we had. The way Amex worked, each sprint had a different plan and allowance. Are these features doable? Are they actually adding value when choosing a card? Can this fit into the dev team’s allowed time frame? Is what’s on the page now working? All of these questions were imperative in knowing what to include for the card shop journey. Some features we thought of:
Spending Calculator
Eligibility Check
Credit Score Check
Horizontal and Vertical Card Tiles
Alternating Content Page Layout
DESIGN: COME INTO FRUITION
A finalized design doesn’t come easy. With that being said, multiple sketches were drawn first to ensure what we wanted to show would be executed as best as possible and in a timely manner. After deciding on which sketch to go with, I began to create wireframes in Sketch. Frequent changes were made even after designing wireframes but once a finalized design was decided upon, I imported the designs into InVision to show a basic working prototype to the account managers and developers.
USER TESTING: WHAT REALLY WORKS?
With the prototypes or static designs I created, our team and the customer experience team in the UK would hold tests to see if the designs made sense for users. We went about this in several different ways.
A/B Testing with static designs
User testing with actual Amex customers with series of questions while navigating through InVision prototypes
Live tests on website to measure browsing time and conversion rate
I found that watching the user testing sessions with actual customers proved to be the most beneficial because I was able to see the users’ expressions, their browsing habits, what they were thinking while navigating through the pages, and etc. This type of information was very helpful because while numbers play an important part, numbers can’t give me emotions, feelings, and thoughts. I was able to see how much joy a feature gave or how much the user was frustrated with a certain element on the page. It’s another dimension that plays a very important role when deciding on how to design a product.
WHAT I LEARNED
CORPORATE TEAMWORK
With my experience, I found working for a big financial brand like Amex to be better than I imagined. Perhaps it’s because of the culture Amex wanted to instill in the company. Everyone I worked with was very open to hearing new ideas and creative ways to come to a solution. By no means is it a start-up lifestyle/culture but for a financial company, it was somewhat “relaxed” and not so “corporate.” My team members were great people to work with. Everyone respected each other, stayed in their own lane, and trusted each other to put in their expertise so that collectively, we could get the job done. This helped me to learn more about what they did and how they did their work. I was also able to teach them about my craft. Being part of the international card shop team meant that I had other “teams” to work with from other countries. The hardest thing about that was to find a good time for both parties to align on what needed to be done and maybe cultural differences. My team in NYC and also the UK (maybe I got lucky with personalities) all got along really well and made work enjoyable. I would love to have them on my team at any job.
TIME IS TICKING
American Express has a pretty big reputation as being a premier credit card and there’s a standard that employees need to uphold. Get your work done on time. We had plenty of planning sprints so that everyone knew what was coming and how to work accordingly. Because I was the only UX/UI designer on the international card shop team, I spent most of my days overworked with no help at all. Constant changes and designs for markets with some having over 10 products that needed annotations for each breakpoint (this was crazy). I had to prioritize my work and make decisions on which market would get their designs first. My decision making improved under pressure and the way I work changed a little as well. It forced me to look for quicker solutions as well as not being afraid to ask for help.
NOT EVERYONE IS THE SAME
No matter what you say, nobody is the same. You may think something makes sense and it probably does to you, but to the person that lives halfway across the world, it just doesn’t work. I learned that culture and where someone grew up plays a huge part in how a product should look and work. People in the US or UK do things different from people in Hong Kong, Japan or India. You could even go even more micro and say that people in Texas do things completely different from people in New Hampshire. I’ve only really done experience design research for people in the US. It was very interesting to see data from different parts of the world and see what design experience worked the best for them. Designing can’t be about what you think will work for others. You have to go deeper than that.