2010

American Express OPEN Forum

American Express OPEN Forum was a well-established publication site with over 17,000 members at the time. It featured social networking and educational components dedicated to helping small businesses succeed.

Problem

By tracking user behaviors on the site, we found that visitors tended to enter the site through external links to articles and then leave the site without browsing other content, never realizing the value of the content on the site or connecting with other small business owners.

Our Approach

Small business owners told us the content was valuable so one of our main goals was to increase engagement and time spent on site so we focused on developing a robust tagging system that embraced an organic, intelligent, flexible and user-centric navigational system. Addressing navigational and structural changes allowed us to establish a solid foundation upon which all future functionality can be built upon.

My Role

At CPB, I served as one of the lead experience designers from conceptual studies and strategy through launch of the complete redesign of American Express OPEN Forum.

Site strategy and direction
Designed information architecture and wireframe specs of select templates/content types
Oversaw visual design and development
Managed and directed the work of 3 other UX designers.

Tagging & Intelligence

Using what we would like deem primitive algorithms today, we developed a content strategy within the site that would suggest related articles or content to what the customer was currently viewing. The algorithm took into account popular content on the site, what the small business owner has previously looked at and rank other content to hopefully present new, relevant content to them.

In order to make this succeed, one key aspect to the work was creating a content management system that empowered content creators to easily add key tags to the content.