American Express Business Class:
a content publishing platform and SEO engine

Project Status: View Live

My Role: Group Creative Director / Design Manager

The Ask: American Express was looking for a fresh look & feel for OPEN Forum—a content repository for Thought Leadership articles published by American Express over the years. Our reframe was that this content should not only look better, but also work harder by optimally capturing search traffic and answering real questions for small business owners.

Our KPI’s would be an increase in search traffic volume, increased average time spent on site, and click through rate to product pages on the commerce site from the content platform (renamed Business Trends & Insights; and later Business Class).

The ‘north star’ driving our research and design thinking was the insight that, coupled with the Amex product offering of financial backing for businesses, a knowledge center could evolve toward something akin to a self-service business accelerator.

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The platform MVP, “Business Trends & Insights,” came together and launched in under 3 months. The editorial calendar grew to include series content, live and social-hosted events (e.g. “Insta MBA”), partnerships, and podcasts. The team today produces some 40+ new articles per month based on customer needs and market research.

Our design team also kept busy iterating on the look and feel toward an immersive experience with full-bleed video, liberal use of white space for scannability and reading comfort, and thoughtful dynamic photography containers with aspect ratios that are more friendly across multiple breakpoints and devices. The net effect was a new site design system that looked sharp and wasn’t as easy to break.