AMEX
Points Summary
Membership rewards at AMEX represents everything points related including how cardmembers earn and use points for things like flights, hotel stays and exclusive events.
As part of the design system rollout and rebrand my team was asked to refresh the point summary experience. We learned cardmembers were struggling to understand program rules including how bonusing categories worked and how quickly earned points would be available for use. Failing to address these needs would be a missed opportunity to address cardmember pain-points and reduce internal operational costs.
if you have an eligible card, visit the experience.
Team
Product Design Lead
UX Researcher
UX Writer
Engineering Lead
Product Manager
Duration
3 months
Simplifying complexity
One of the biggest goals, and challenges was simplifying the complex and nuanced program rules that compounded with each additional rewards card a single cardmember possessed. Steering clear of over-communicating and using customer facing language were a few guiding principles for this experience.
Stakeholder management
The second challenge was managing stakeholders. This includes insights, expectations, goals and updates. This experience alone had millions of recurring visitors and intersected with many other parts of the product, so collective awareness was important. Misalignment presented itself as a growing list of requirements, excessive feedback loops.
A design studio was invaluable in gathering insight, priorities and feedback from different departments and aligning on a prioritized list of user problems to address in the first iteration. After that, weekly to bi-weekly updates through the duration of the project also helped keep the lines of communication open.
Connecting stakeholders and user insights
We left the design studio with a high fidelity layout of version 1.
This first iteration was very much a design by committee and included and reflected as many ideas as stakeholders. But the goal was to invite stakeholders into the design process and not function as gatekeepers. So we put it in-front of users and invited stakeholders to observe users interacting with this version.
IMPACT
By leveraging “rapid usability labs” we were able to test with 6 users in one day as to not slow down the development process while ensuring an open user feedback loop. Insights were valuable for our team, other teams and the growing design system.
The refresh resulted in a 20% decrease in points-related call center volume translating to ~$73k in operational costs.
I'd love to share in-depth details about:
Overcoming misalignment between stakeholders
Getting rapid user feedback insights
Balancing new explorations and consistency with other experiences