Enterprise Experience
In addition to my 10 years of product design experience within smaller startups, I have 2.5 years of product design experience in large enterprise environments. This includes roles at PayPal, Elsevier, and American Express. These roles helped me apply my entrepreneurial knowledge to bigger problems and refine my communication skills.
Job Roles
American Express
Apr. 2022 - Feb. 2024
Oct. 2024 - Dec. 2024
Lead Product Designer
In my first role, I owned product design for all products that enabled the acquisition of customers for the US Savings, Checking, & Personal Loans products. In my second role, I led design within a team of engineers that are building a web governance platform from the ground up.
My Process at Amex
1. Meet with product teams to identify problems that need design-based solutions.
2. Work with researchers to identify any information gaps and set plans for needed research activities.
3. Create low-fidelity design assets like wireframes, mockups and interactive prototypes to support research activities.
4. Create user personas and journeys to help map out the user experience and help with ideation.
5. Host design workshops with stakeholders to extract insight from all data sources and ideate on possible solutions.
6. Create variants of the solutions to be further tested with users and customers, including but not limited to A/B testing.
7. Use feedback from user testing and usability studies to finalize solution.
8. Design high-fidelity assets with accessibility annotations and create supporting documentation for proper implementation by engineers.
Case Study -- Full Re-design of Savings Application Journey (Heavy Research Focus)
Visit https://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/banking/online-savings/account/ and click "Open an Account" to view the live experience.
Main Challenges
1) Third-party credential creation was causing confusion for some users and leading to drop-off and lower conversion rates.
2) There was a need to systematically identify the user's relationship to Amex instead of directly asking them.
3) The existing journey lacked clear copy and wasn't optimized for a seamless user experience.​
Research Activities
There was a heavy emphasis on all research activities. Any small change in the experience could lead to tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue, so it was absolutely necessary to ensure every design decision was based on data.
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1) Data Analysis - Viewed existing usage data to extract patterns in user behavior and identify areas that needed improvement.
2) Customer Interviews - Learned more about customer pain points and their experience within the application journey.
3) Usability Testing - Created several interactive prototypes for new features and new copy. Observed how customers navigated and used these prototypes and interviewed them to identify where there was friction and what worked.
Solutioning
1) Stakeholder Design Workshops - Extracted insight from all data sources to build user personas and map their journeys. This helped with the ideation of solutions and feature prioritization.
2) High-Fidelity Design - Used the existing design language system to create high-fidelity mockups. Collaborated with the DLS (Design Language System) team to ensure new components could be created and added to the design system.
3) UX Copywriting, Accessibility and Compliance - Partnered with a UX copywriter, compliance, and accessibility experts. Any copy would need to be extensively reviewed to ensure it was complying with all federal regulations. All designs were made to comply with ADA and WCAG 2.2 standards.
4) QA and Final Usability - Final review and usability testing, and A/B testing to ensure the solution was ready to be implemented.
Hand-off to Engineers for Implementation
1) Upload Design Assets to Invision - Used Invision to make design assets available for engineers. Engineers could examine the specifications of the screens and see the corresponding css code. Eventually Amex switched to Figma for this.
2) Accessibility Annotation - Added annotations to designs to point out required accessibility specifications.
3) Design Language System Notes - Added notes to explain which design system components were being used and or created so that the engineers could easily build the interface using Amex's "Building Block Library."
Outcome
1) Credential Creation In-House - Created a new user flow the enabled the automatic creation of an American Express online account during the application process.
2) Systematic Identification Method - Designed a flow that would gather inputs in a specific order to enable the back-end to identify the user's relationship to American Express.
3) Usability Optimizations - Reduced the number of pages and steps that users had to complete, completely removed a number of redundancies that led to an inefficient data collection process, and refined copy for better messaging and alignment to regulations.
4) New Accounts Acquired (NAA) - The rollout of these improvements led to a 151% increase in new accounts acquired from YTD Sep’22 to YTD Sep’23 for the US savings product.
Elsevier
Dec. 2021 - Mar. 2022
Senior UX Designer (Contract)
Senior UX designer for a team focused on new product innovation. Collaborated with team of 12 to conduct research, prototype solutions, and iterate to identify product opportunities.
The AIM (Agents of Innovation Monetization) program at Elsevier is an initiative designed to identify problems and build solutions to help drive new revenue streams and further reinforce Elsevier’s mission of improving patient care. I was the lead UX designer on a team consisting of 2 UX strategists, 1 UX researcher, the VP of UX Design, Sr. Director of Nursing & Patient Solutions, 2 Nurse Executives, Sr. Software Architect, and 3 others.
Paypal
June 2021 - Sept. 2021
UX Designer (Contract)
UX designer for Paypal integration team for small and medium size merchants. Reviewed 200+ ecommerce sites to identify opportunities for UX improvements. Designed style guide for PayPal's internal eLearning platform.
Part of a new initiative that focused on providing free UX reviews to existing clients that had Paypal integrated to their eCommerce website. The goal was to demonstrate what these websites would look and function like with Paypal fully integrated to its maximum potential and up-sell the clients to have them pay to update their website. At the end of this initiative, I used my extra time to begin creating the style guide for their eLearning platform.