AAA My Account Redesign strategy
The AAA provides a wide variety of products, including memberships and travel bookings. AAA members can manage their products online, but it's very limited and basic. The time has come to improve that journey.
This project envisions a system that allows users to manage their products and review information through their My Account page, providing a cohesive transition and combination of multiple strategies that are proposed across different product lines.
Project overview
The space called My Account provides users to manage their products and access their information, creating a high volume of traffic since we offer a wide range of products and services. Different lines of business competed for limited spaces on this page to notify and cross-sell their products, which received the lowest satisfaction scores. In light of this, there were several attempts to revamp this space, however, it never became successful for various reasons. This has been on and off in the backlog for quite some time.
After providing a new strategy and implementation for the insurance Acquisition, I took over the project again.
This project had several specific goals for me: first, to show user-centric design and identify data integration that needs to be implemented with a new design. Second, to show how to lead and collaborate with difficult members of the team and integrate the various strategies presented by the other UX team members.
My Role & Responsibility
As a UX lead for this project, I led the entire process and the strategy of this project, closely collaborating with different team members including a product manager and lead engineers.
My Role:
Created a strategy for the next My Account 3.0
Led the workflow for creating the strategy.
Led and facilitated the collaboration sessions with a product manager(TS) and lead engineers.
Led user research in the discovery phase
Conducted concept testing
Led the phasing activities for the product roadmap.
Created the design phases to get to the revamped design for technical feasibility.
Combined the smaller strategies into the high-level strategies.
Pitched global navigation concept.
My Responsibility:
Provide the product team with the redesign of the My Account page and its sub-flows.
Work with SMEs to identify unique business rules and conditions regards to different regions.
Ensure the new design is user-friendly and mobile-friendly.
Incorporate the users’ needs, identify the API integration items that needs to be done to support users’ needs.
Worked with the product manager and lead engineers to make sure the team is sharing the same goal and vision.
Collaborate during road map generation to make sure the phasing is planned correctly to reduce the learning curve for users.
Validate the design and iterations
Utilize data to keep track of the project status and create backlogs for near-term, interrum, and long-term(3.0) phases.
Work with developers to create their backlog items for the 3.0.
Manage and delegate workload to other UX designers.
Contribute to UX team resourcing.
Project goal
Improve the total satisfaction score of My Account
As per AAA's website survey feedback and the JD Power study in 2021, the most common complaints relate to managing and accessing product information. As a result of these negative experiences, the organization's overall satisfaction score was negatively affected.
UX GOAL
Develop a system design that makes it easy for users to view and manage their products and services. Enhance navigation and organization of information to help users understand and become familiar with the site.
Modernize the user experience and technology
There are multiple versions of designs in the My Account flow, some from early 2000 to recent optimization with UX strategies derived from other business lines. Changing design languages and architectures each time the user navigates further into the My Account flow makes learning the system more challenging. Further, the "recent" design solutions were mostly focused on updating UI components, not on upgrading technology.
UX GOAL
Design a cohesive layout structure based on user experience principles and make use of a shared component library. Utilize newer technology and interactions to enhance usability and experience.
Design a system that meets the needs of multiple business lines
This page used to serve as a hodgepodge for different lines of business to promote their initiatives. There was no clear definition of what should be on this page or how it should be organized. The lack of direction or guidance on organizing and filtering information in My Account caused users to ignore the information, resulting in negatively impacting their initiatives.
UX GOAL
Establish a clear vision for My Account. Provide product teams with a guide to understand the vision and structure of My Account, so that they can learn how to use it. This frees up the UX team to focus on enhancing and advancing the system vision rather than doing repetitive and meaningless work right now.
The process overview
During this project, I wanted to address some of the concerns My Account team had raised from previous experiences with UX team members. To demonstrate my ideal partnership with the team, I focused on collaboration and inclusion. It was intended to create a sense of ownership among the team rather than giving them over to the solution without incorporating their insights. Fortunately, I was able to decide how to proceed with the project and how long it would take. Therefore I chose the double diamond process and involved the product manager and lead engineers from the beginning.
Discover (2 weeks)
Understand the users
Understand the mental models
Understand the journeys
Understand business KPIs
Understand the technical constraints
Understand the business requirements
Methods:Heuristic evaluation
Product landscape evaluation
AAA website survey
Funnel Analytics
Observation
SME interview
Industry and trend studies - Competitor Analysis
JD Power study
Define (2 week)
Experience principles
The opportunity areas
Vision
Usability goals
Methods:Journey maps
Personas
Experience principles
Conceptual modeling
Develop (1 week)
System architecture
Information architecture
Site map
New features
Integrate insurance management strategy, chatbot strategy, and discounts & rewards strategy
Methods:Concept testing
Flow design
Navigation design
Deliver (ongoing)
Methods:Phasing scopes
Executive presentation
Roadmap generation
lo-fi mocks
Strategy deck
mobile app integration
Discover.
The discovery phase aimed to understand three key groups: 1. Users, 2. The business, and 3. The technology. From the beginning, I included the product manager and lead engineer in the process. I suggested making a list of assumptions and questions we currently have and then verifying them based on the research. Using the whiteboard, we wrote lists of things we wanted to learn and confirm. Then we each ran the selected research to gain insights from one of the key groups.
Conducted researchesI conducted research to understand the needs of the users, the business rules, and product trends. It was a joint effort between the product manager(TS) and me to conduct the studies. With previous attempts to optimize this My Account space, we wanted to review existing data first. Thanks to the data collection team, we were able to gain a good understanding of the business and users on the top tasks users perform. In addition to the existing data, we conducted two additional studies: interviews with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and competitor analysis. Several subject matter experts were interviewed, including the digital support team, the member service team, and the previous product owner.
Subject Matter Experts(SME) interview key findings
User expectations:
"My Account journey begins with signing up for an account"
"Manage EVERY product with my name on it."
Immediately manage newly purchased products
Get personalized information and offers
Business limitation:
Complicated and unique business rules to only ACE
Business rules that block members to perform a simple task
Common features are not available or inconsistent capabilities based on different product lines.
Security protection becomes a disruption to the user’s workflow
Technical limitation:
Competitor Analysis key findings
During our competitor analysis, we examined 19 companies from various industries, including insurance and enterprise websites. By doing these studies together, we were already able to identify some high-level directions for product and design.
The common experience is…
Educational
Comprehensive
Polished
Helpful
Meaningful
Accessible
SIMPLE
Personalized
Contextual
Efficient
Predictive
Straightforward
Streamlined
Seamless
high-level summary of the experience: 1. Personalized menus 2. All products in one sight, 3. simple structure
To help what users want to do, we are far behind from the industry - modern user experience. This impacts the familiarity.
Dig a little deeper to know our users
Not just from hearing the customer service experts and our heurstic analysis, we needed to make sure our assumptions are correct. This time, we had to hear from our users. It was one of biggest challenge at the time to interview members. However this doesn’t mean we don’t collect the data from members. And the data don’t just reside in My Account world. Since My Account is the entry point to management of their products, I got to collect the previous user studies we ran PLUS reviewed 3 months worth of feedback we recieved on the website. Also generated the persona based on the market research team data as well as the analytics team, to identify the member types.
Key product and usability issues:
Other "account" information is not available/scattered throughout the site/3rd-party sites
description of the issue
2. No live-updates - information takes days to be processed and updated
description
3. The global menu is confusing
4. Difficult to view and quick access to the top tasks
5. in desktop view, takes multiple scrolls when more information presented - not utilizing the real estate
Personas and their journey
We had 4 types of users - long term member with multiple products, long term member with core products, and a newly joined member with one core product, lastly an associate who wants to view the policy info they are on.
Then with the verbatims and observation notes, I started to map out the users’ journey. Again I included the product manager in this exercise, to make sure she is emphasizing the journey and also add her findings. This is where our scope has modified a bit, to tackle the register/login flow. This was driven by the findings from SME interviews as well as the feedback we gathered from users.
Even though the personas had 4 different types, their pain points share the similarity. We highlighted the unique pain points for the specific persona, and created a high-level key areas. Then I reviewed the journey map with product manager and lead engineer one more time. This was time to go into the opportunity area. This section worked as a idea dumping areas, when we are best in mindset with users. After this session, I analyzed the ideas to create the conceptual model and experience principles.
Problem statements
So here’s the summarized problem statements.
Problem statement 1:
A majority of tasks that members struggle to perform relate to unique business rules and technical debts we have in the back-end system. Internal system integration is outdated or not available, becoming a blocker to the simplest tasks such as presenting the payment method information on the billing summary. Due to a lack of communication of the system status, members don’t understand why certain functionalities or information are visible or accessible and feel lost.
Problem statement 2:
The information provided in My Account does not cover all the information that the user has with us. Retrieving information about other products such as travel, credit cards, and my AAR are all scattered throughout the site, where the contents on the global menus are actually marketing materials - forcing users to use the search bar to look up their personal information around the products we don’t display in My Account.
Problem statement 3:
The members want to manage and view their account information however they choose to, whether logging in versus not logging in. The lack of providing an easier and sealess way of getting to the multiple authentication levels to access simple information to complex information brings frustration.
Divide and Conquer
As I mentioned earlier, I divided the responsibility with product manager and lead engineer (FF). While I get to understand users, product manger(TS) and lead engineer(FF) went on to collect the current status of business requirements and technical capabilities. The results were pretty devastating. We found out that it was more of the business requirements that purposely blocking users to perform a task. Also, the system architecture is not able to support the integration we can have with other product lines, nor flexible enough to modify.
Yet getting discouraged by these big huddles we need to overcome, it was natural for me to put a head around with product and engineer to tackle these issues separately. And this time, we needed to involve more higher-up people.
Bi-weekly review with stakeholders: Share the findings with the plans
I set up a bi-weekly review with the head of products, Clublabs group manager, and head of UX to share the findings. This is not just working as a review session, but was a great way to share where we are at, and open up the discussion on the harder huddle we need to overcome. We asked their insights, then suggested what each of disciplinary can do for next steps. As a result, we were able to prioritize the work, estimate the timeline, and scope out the engineering time to push for the integration with the team outside of our team.
A small success in collaboration & inclusionNo surprises at the end
Everyone is on board at this point
Prioritize the items together - gets support right away to eliminate blockers
Everyone has clear understanding of the product timeline
Define.
After understanding the users, business requirements and echi requirements, I dived right away to define the experience.
Define the experience principles.
description.
2. Define the strategy
1.
2.
3.
3. Define the vision
My Account is an essential component of the website that allows members to see and manage their products, benefits, and statuses. My account evolves into a core hub to view, manage, and explore products, moving away from being just a single navigational page to a site with a well-constructed architectural menu. This emphasizes personalization, the efficiency of getting things done quicker, and the opportunity to view contextual and personalized benefits and offers.
This seamless and streamlined member-driven experience will bring the business success in the future.
Usability goals
Optimizing for mobile and desktop devices
Eliminating barriers to completion
Providing an efficient and logical way to navigate to the information and the tasks
Providing reassurance that expert “human” help is readily available
Incorporating contextual guidance
Clarifying groups of information and hierarchy in menus and contents
Providing a straightforward taxonomy to describe the functionalties of the menus and key sections
Leveraging data, insights and user expectations from ISS, Chatbot, and Discount strategies
Presenting the information in a logical sequence to easily scan and comprehend
Providing transparency, context and status
Creating a consistency in the legacy product pages and third-party sites
Simplifying and standardizing interactions
Reducing errors and improving recovery time
Adhering to accessibility standards
Improving response times
Offering flexibility and customization
Being upfront about benefits and discounts
Providing a consistent omnichannel experience
Develop.
Reconstructing the house.
Structure
Navigation (modernize)
Layout
Personalization
New concepts - Shopping cart, iss hub, hands off (menu structure)
To Mobile app - influence the mobile app direction
Test
Deliver.
Presented to higher-up, executives. Successful, but tech needed to be sorted out first. this month finally finished, API integration happening. Chatbot integrated. Now in the process of detailing out the solution concept with the business requirements and new design system I’m working on(3.0). Design will be iterated, but will be following the guideline provided to the designer under me.