American Express case study hero

American Express

Redesigning AMEX Enterprise Tool

End-to-end redesign of nVision—American Express’s internal BI workspace—focused on the Admin Panel where teams govern metadata, publish reports, and keep enterprise reporting consistent.

ROLE

Product Designer

TIMELINE

2022 — 2023

IMPACT

Unified workflows across BI analyst teams

Overview

nVision is an in-house one stop shop enabling consumption of business performance reports across domains of AMEX. It consolidates reporting across multiple BI tools and provides a single-interface unified report distribution and alerting platform.

nVision Admin Panel is like the control centre. This is where admins and report producers manage all the data, ensuring everything runs smoothly.

This redesign focused on reducing friction in those admin workflows—navigation, metadata management, report creation, and dashboard maintenance—so teams spend less time fighting the tool and more time delivering trustworthy reporting.

Why Redesign

The legacy nVision Admin experience made everyday tasks harder than they needed to be: cumbersome navigation, excessive clicks, overwhelming information, non-intuitive design, and wasted man-hours when admins and producers tried to update metadata, publish reports, or manage dashboards.

Users

The platform was used by two primary roles: Admins and Report Uploaders. Admins were responsible for creating, editing, and maintaining reports. Report Uploaders, on the other hand, uploaded reports related to their respective Business Units to the dashboard, adhering to the metadata specifications defined by the Admins.

My Approach

I started by aligning with PMs on how nVision worked today, then mapped the full journey—including edge cases—before validating gaps with research. From there I iterated through wireframes, stakeholder reviews, mid-fi testing, and final prototypes.

Diagram of my approach: discovery, mapping, validation, iteration, wireframes, stakeholder reviews, testing, and final prototypes

Existing Platform & Journeys

I broke down all the major journeys into very superficial flows so that I understand the scope of work in place. This also helped me look at the individual journeys from a functional perspective.

From these journeys I started to understand patterns as to where the potential problem would lie.

In order to study all the journeys in more depth, I came up with the detailed flow for each journey as follows (snapshot from my Mural Board)

Detailed user journey flows grouped by Control Panel, Upload Reports and Files, and Add Images for Reports

Research

I began by identifying a group of users across two key roles: Admins, who had full access to manage tasks and functions within the admin panel, and Report Uploaders, who were responsible solely for uploading data files to reports created by admins. I then interviewed 32 users to understand their workflows and identify which journeys were the most problematic and why.

Task research: six cards with pie charts comparing users who faced frustrations versus those who found navigation easy—for creating reports, uploading files, multiple versions, multiple files, subscriber lists, and adding subscribers.

User Flows

I constructed the old user flow and marked all the possible pain points that the users were facing.

Legacy user flow: Control Panel through report creation and metadata editing, with pain points highlighted for bulk creation, column clarity, table execution, redundant steps, and error journey usability.

This helped me thinking about the new user flow and how different decisions can solve the initial pain points.

Redesigned user flow: separated create paths, simplified error handling, clearer fields, bulk options, and scalable repository selection—solutions annotated in green.

Final Design

The original dashboard felt fragmented and task-oriented: navigation lived in tabs without a strong hierarchy, and admins had to hunt for status and actions instead of scanning the workspace at a glance.

Original nVision admin dashboard: blue header, horizontal tabs, and a sparse reports table with basic actions.

Original Dashboard

The redesign consolidates control into a clearer layout—centralized navigation, stronger visual hierarchy, and actionable status—so teams can orient quickly and focus on the work that matters.

  1. Key metrics displayed upfront.
  2. Report modification options activate upon row selection.
  3. A new isolated journey for creating reports.
Redesigned admin portal: sidebar navigation, welcome and KPI cards, control panel banner, and reports repository with row selection and status badges.

Final Dashboard Design

Update Metadata Journey

  1. Users have a better overview of the complete dashboard.
  2. Admins can have a look at the major key insights of the report performance at a glance (Metrics displayed above).
  3. The error journey is more intuitive now. Inline error editing functionality was well received by the users.
  4. The approach of selecting reports and then performing actions is a new approach taken and would help the users to focus on that particular report.
  5. The approach of straightaway validating and finalising the report felt better than the confusing approach before.

Create New Report

  1. The user can browse and select multiple reports in order to upload within the space page dashboard.
  2. The errors get displayed in case there are any problems while uploading the reports on the dashboard.
  3. The user can now edit the cells within the table in case of any errors (red) or warnings (yellow).
  4. This allows user to create reports in bulk at a time.

Impact

  1. The redesign of the nVision Admin Panel significantly improved workflow efficiency, reducing the dependency on Product Owners for routine queries.
  2. By streamlining report uploads and administrative tasks, the new system enhanced self-sufficiency, allowing users to complete their work with minimal friction.
  3. This transformation had a measurable impact on American Express, cutting man-hours by 90%, leading to substantial operational cost savings.
  4. The reduction in redundant back-and-forth communication freed up valuable time for admins, report uploaders, and Product Owners, enabling them to focus on higher-value tasks.
  5. This efficiency boost not only accelerated decision-making but also enhanced overall productivity across teams, reinforcing the company’s commitment to seamless internal operations and digital transformation.