Designing Simplicity: $167M New Revenue from a User-Friendly Lending Platform
Role: UX Lead
Situation:
Facing a Customer Exodus, American Express saw customer decline due to a lost partnership and missed opportunities with younger users.
The Goal:
Craft a seamless digital platform (mobile & web) for converting individual credit card charges into interest-free, fixed monthly payment plans.
Final product marketing.
The Approach:
Embarking on this transformative journey, we navigated six key steps:
Stakeholder Interviews: Document assumptions and learn from past efforts.
Customer co-creation: Understanding needs and priorities.
Ideation workshop: Incorporate learnings to arrive at viable product solutions.
Usability testing: Identifying pain points and refining the experience.
Internal beta: Ensuring the product ecosystem worked seamlessly.
Launch: Closely monitoring product metrics and customer service contacts.
Co-creation session.
Starting point, stakeholder suggested experience.
Insights:
Co-creation exercises unveiled a misalignment between customers' mental models of credit cards and our initial product approach, prompting a pivotal product adjustment.
Usability Testing highlighted customer confusion regarding the "Plan Adjusted Balance" on their accounts when creating a payment plan. This insight guided us to develop improved design treatments for balance amounts, enhancing clarity while maintaining legal compliance.
Data Driven Product Development:
Our process was data-driven and collaborative, involving cross-functional stakeholders. We leveraged agile development and conducted multiple rounds of Usability Testing using RITE methodology to refine the user experience, ensuring clarity in our value proposition, creation flows, amount owed, and payments.
Challenges Conquered:
Aligning web & mobile: Iterative prototyping ensured a consistent feel.
Engaged stakeholders: Resolving strong opinions from diverse perspectives.
Guiding Leadership: Collaborative workshops fostered understanding of how to work with UX.
Demystifying finance: Simple visuals and clear language clarified complex interest and fees.
The Result:
Transforming Challenges into Success: After an 18-month journey filled with hurdles, we triumphed! Our end-to-end experience was fully validated, offering:
A strong entry point
Legally compliant and scalable creation journey
Effective conveyance of essential information to customers across desktop & mobile experiences
Final mobile experience.
Impact:
The impact was profound:
640K+ Plans created in 6 months (47% repeat users)
$450M in Plans, exceeding estimates by 26%
$167M in New Business
Project was awarded the 2017 “Digital Achievement Award”