American Express - ExitMaritz / LSM
The American Express Membership rewards program was supported by 4 separate vendors in addition to the AET Delivery Transformation Team. This made for a very fragmented user experience. So in 2014 Amex began transitioning the service in-house by migrating the services provided by Endeca and ATT over to the Amex LSM—Loyalty Supply Manager.
A Successful Transition
By June of 2014, MR was successfully weaned off Endeca and ATT, at a savings of $2M. The next phase would be Maritz, and so this project had come to be known as “ExitMaritz”. Next up would be Ekaria.
Maritz integrated with five systems: AESP Service Pages, corporate and consumer sites, the mobile web (a separate code base for the mobile site which was being decommissioned) and 2 other loyalty programs. The migration was to be made in three release phases: Gift Cards, Point Transfer and Statement Credit. For Phase 1 (gift cards) only the landing pages would no longer be hosted by Maritz; for the foreseeable future, the detail pages would continue to be.
Opportunity knocks
I had no sooner finished making my monthly payment to my Amex green card, when I received a call from my agent…Amex needed my help. So it was off to lower Manhattan for me.
I began by mapping out the architecture of the future state…
The next step was to plot the user’s journey through the application. One of the most critical flows was the approval process, which depended heavily on user permissions. So, I included a user and task analysis to inform the interactions between the system and the actors (Partner Manager and Operations).
Key to mapping the user journey was identifying the actors within the flow and understanding the roles they played.
THE WIREFRAMES
Next it was on to the wires which were built in OmniGraffle Prop, my go-to tool for UX artifacts ranging from IA and user journey maps to lo-fidelity wireframe and prototypes. The final screens would be built in Sketch.
Being a proponent of Lean UX, I worked out the wires as a lighter-weight artifact first—hand-drawn sketches—then built them in OmniGraffle using the next iteration of my own home-brewed “Wireframe VDL”.
With each new assignment I would employ my latest iteration of an easily understood visual design language designed specifically for wireframes to ensure consistency and understandability. Each iteration would build on the previous, incorporating new findings and aligning with the current brand. This was one of the few interfaces that I had recently worked on that did not need to employ “mobile first thinking”, although it was slated to be responsive. I included a breakpoint ruler at the top, and callouts for the annotations in the margin to indicate affordances and interactions.
The resulting screens were built in the Sketch app by my UI design partner Juno Lee. Juno was a master in Sketch which was relatively new at the time, and his willingness to share his knowledge was instrumental to my eventual transition to this marvelous tool.
We commuted back and forth between “The Tower” in lower Manhattan at 3WTC, and Pivotal Labs on West 22nd street, where three days a week we worked closely with the development team. “Pair Programming” was very much the thing at Pivot Labs, and so “Pair Designing” was a natural evolution of that concept within the UX culture. By pairing a UX designer with a UI designer and collaborating closely with the tech team during story grooming and sprint planning sessions, nothing was left to chance.
The success of this B2B application led to the consumer-facing work for the Membership Rewards Product.
