Refreshing the Amex Business app, optimizing business users’ workflow
Overview
In 2020, I redesigned the Amex Business to improve business user’s workflows and modernize the UI. The app, originally built in 2012 as a receipt-matching tool for small businesses, had outgrown its purpose, resulting in disjoined experience.
My role
Led iOS design and facilitated cross-functional design reviews and discovery workshops to align on the redesign scope
Partnered closely with the engineering team to design the first iteration of spending insights, reusing existing UI libraries to reduce scope and enable fast testing
Collaborated with the Statements team to ensure account balance information was consistent and scalable, and worked with the UX writer and legal teams to clarify account balance tooltips for users
Outcome
In the year following release, the Business app saw a total increase of +40% monthly visitors and +9% visit frequency. In addition, presenting our research discovery findings and vision to product leadership led to successful partnerships and new initiatives for our UX team.
Timeline
2020 – 2021
Why was this important to solve?
The Amex Business app streamlines daily tasks like tracking transactions and handling expenses. However, years of adding features impacted usability. The redesign was essential to address these problems to restore efficiency, enhance user satisfaction while driving business value.
Before
Account + Transactions siloed
After
Account + Transactions centralized
How might we simplify and centralize account and membership information for business users, saving them time and hassle?
The challenge
Users
Most small business owners juggle a lot responsibilities on a daily basis. Managing finances is not something they look forward to, and don’t expect a steep learning curve when it comes to their banking product.
Business users primarily use the app to check on their account balances and ensure they’re not late on payments. Having a quick and easy way to view their finances is their utmost priority.
Challenges
There were two main factors guiding this project.
Business app visual uplift
At the same time, the Amex Business app was going through a visual overhaul, which was handled from a different team. Since our teams’ works were closely related, I ensured to set up regular cadences and checkpoints to align on shifting timelines as well as making sure the designs are flexible and scalable.
Limited tech resources and data
We were short on engineering resources and limited access to app usage data, which restricted the scope of our redesign approach. We also lacked baseline metrics for our KPIs, presenting ongoing challenges in this area.
Goal
Drawing from research, we aligned with our product partners on the shared goals of our users, business and the enterprise:
Improve the efficiency of a small business owner’s workflow, while making it easier to find and understand information, so that Amex is viewed as a trusted, valued partner and primary resource for their business needs.
We tested two distinct layouts to concept test with business app users.
Concept testing
Through a co-designing workshop with Product, we came up with two different account summary layouts to align with business user’s workflows. To quickly validate our designs, we ran a concept test to identify the best layout and gather insights for a scalable, integrated experience.
Concept A
Pros
Surfaces the most essential account information and entry points
Using modular tiles to organize account info improves scanability
Cons
Doesn’t provide a holistic view of the account
Oversimplification may lead to user confusion
Concept B
Pros
Provides a more holistic view of account
Progressive disclosure reducing cognitive load
Cons
Use of accordions may reduce clutter but Increases physical interaction cost by requiring more taps
What we learned
Less is not more
Business owners need to see their account and statement balance along with their recent transactions to make sure their recent payments went through and that they’re making payments on time. Surfacing the most essential account information and recent transactions should be prioritized.
More clicks are okay
Business owners preferred to navigate to different screen when they needed more time to digest the information, like seeing their account balance breakdown.
Making payment is the primary task
Business owners open the app primarily to make a check account balance and make payment. Account balance and making a payment should be prioritized and prominent for quick easy access.
The final polish
Centralized information
Users now land on Account Summary screen upon login, allowing them to quickly scan their account balance information. They also have easy access to priority tasks, like viewing their recent transactions and making a payment—all in one place.
Updated user interface
At the same time of the new Account Summary tab launch, we were able to roll out the “Business App reskin,” and deliver a new, modern app with an overall improvement in user experience.
Spending insights tool
This feature came as a requirement from the enterprise strategy to centralize Amex small business products into a single product. We hypothesized that business owners would value seeing a visualization of their account spending in order to gain insight on their business finances.
I partnered closely with my Product Manager and Engineering partners to leverage the existing spending insights feature from the web experience to bring it into the app. We were able reuse an existing UI library for both iOS and Android, lowering engineering lift, and the team was able to ship this feature in parallel to the Account Summary tab redesign.
Learnings and takeaways
Advocate for access to data and app usage metrics
Although we had gone through a comprehensive discovery phase through secondary research, stakeholder interviews and co-designing workshop sessions with various stakeholders to support our design decisions, we didn’t have baseline data on app usage and metrics to further support our assumptions to measure the success of the redesign and impact. This continued to be an area of opportunity for our team.
Designers should lean on their strengths to define strategy
While the business “ask” was pretty straight-forward, the problem we’re solving from the business owner’s perspective wasn’t so clear. Through using user research early on we were able to narrow down key business owner pain points which allowed us to develop and execute a focused strategy to better address their immediate needs.