THE Brief
The American Express Foreign Currency platform was introduced in 2001. It was heavily outdated, no longer compliant and had fallen far behind the competition. The brief was to re-engineer the FX platform to conform to guidelines. The new system had to:
- Work across 13 different business models
(including B2B, B2C, B2B2C, wholesale, white-label and co-brand)
- Work across several markets: UK, Europe & Australia
- Provide a new admin interface and experience
- Get ahead of the competition
- Provide a first class user experience
This was an 18 month project.
RESPONSIBILITIES
- Comprehensive market and competitor analysis
- Analysis of research conducted by American Express
- Development of approach and project strategy
- Leading weekly review meetings with client
- Weekly meetings with Amex UK/AU digital delivery team
- Managing time & physical resources dedicated to the project
- Current product process analysis
- Design of new system and process functionality
- User Experience and Interaction design
- Content strategy and architecture
- Re-desinging system logic based on capabilities
- Hi-fedility wireframing
- Developing materials for user testing / focus groups
- Assisting in user testing
- Prototyping using a variety of software
- Creative direction on UI design
- Writing and developing specification document
- Managing client change requests
- Managing client relationship
- Consulting client on best practice UX approaches
HQ Mobile Prototype from user testing session 4
(best viewed on mobile)
Project Strategy
After the research was carried out, the scope of the project was vastly expanded. The client was unsure how to proceed yet keep the project on-time and within budget. We developed a strategy where it would provide the client with everything they needed to complete the project across all business models, yet keep the service flexible and easy to expand & develop.
Rather than creating numerous different templates and layouts, we developed a comprehensive modular system.
Specification Document
The specification document comprises of 11 chapters and is in excess of 1000 pages. It includes details on interaction, wireframes, final designs with measurements and style references, transaction journey and user flows.
Managing amends and updates was fully my responsibility and task. There were 7 rounds of revisions and the process had to be managed across 5 Amex departments and 2 continents.
