K

App for Managing User Profiles

Company

Amazon

My Role

  • Design lead
  • Discovery, problem definition
  • Design audit
  • UI design
  • Art direction
  • Copywriting + UX Writing
  • Information architecture

Other Team Members

  • Product Manager (Main stakeholder)

Summary

Businesses needed a way easily manage employee profiles associated with their Amazon Incentives Account.

I conducted exploratory research and rapidly built a prototype. In phase 1, I conducted user research, iterated on the design, before handing off an MVP to our dev team.

Later, I created a multi-screen experience for managing user profiles.

Background and Discovery Info

The Problem

Amazon Incentives customers don't have access to a self-service account management tool. Any type of customer support, including adding users to an account, required emailing the Amazon Gift Cards Operations team. This generates ~1000 manual touch points worldwide per year, increases customer wait times, and creates high fraud risk.

What was done up until this point

  • A previous designer created some speculative wireframes before the project was put on hold.
  • Scoping was complete and the dev work had begun.
  • The aim was to create a way for administrators and others to securely manage user profiles and user permissions without having to contact Amazon.
  • The team was leveraging the RBAC (Role-based access control) framework, a security mechanism that restricts system access by setting permissions and privileges.
Jump to Before and After Jump to Process

Before

(Initial mocks I inherited from a previous designer)



MVP

Add Users screen

Final Design Recommendation

Start Screen for Managing Users

Final Design

Add User Screen

Final Design

Edit User Screen

UX Challenges

  1. The product manager was new to this product line and team. (So was I.) She was still learning historical processes and the true owners of certain workstreams. Moreover, she was new to working with designers.
  2. The product design culture historically has been developer-first, developer-centric.
  3. Time was limited and we had no customer data. Moreover, I discovered there were still outstanding questions from the previous designer.
  4. I had strong instincts about needing to hear from the customer. At Amazon, several principles govern how we work and make decisions. The few principles impacting how I saw this opportunity included Think Big, Bias for Action, Frugality, Are Right a Lot, and Dive Deep. We'd risk a lot by not doing research.
  5. The dev team had previously started building. I had to push back on the team's urge to resume production work, as this was a one-way door (a one-way door is a decisions that's costly to come back from.).
  6. Beyond the homepage, the Amazon Incentives didn't meet the design or UX bar. Tools and info were missing, mislabeled, or dislocated. Moreover, the UI was unresolved.

UX Approach

  1. Audit existing wireframes and mocks. Some findings: Add User vs Send Invite - does sending an invitation add a user the system? Which step creates the account: Sending the invitation or the user clicking “Create Account” in the email? Role choices were either-or, not additive. Can a user be Customer Service and an Authorized Buyer.
  2. Get a deeper understanding of RBAC framework.
  3. Time was big a factor. The PM was primarily focusing on one screen at a time while I wanted to plan out the UX flow for holistic experience. In phase one, we focused creating an MVP for adding, editing, and deleting users. This also included the UX around receiving and accepting an invitation to accept a newly created account.
  4. Rapidly design new mocks leveraging the few anecdotes we had about the customer experience. I could do this quickly since I was leveraging the existing RBAC framework and Amazon's UI Design System (AUI).
  5. Build a testable coded prototype. This was faster than a static image-based prototype.
  6. Do research. Working in parallel, I put together a quick research study in order to test the design - and our assumptions - with real Amazon Incentives customers.

UX Execution

  1. My user research confirmed that even though teams differ company to company, each had similar functional roles. The ability for each profile to have multiple roles was key, as was allowing any user, despite role, have administrator duties.
  2. We used words gleaned from research to label and organized roles and permissions.
  3. Since speed and timing were key, we did the redesign in phases: One to get an MVP out and one that focused on a holistic redesign.
  4. The Edit Users experience was similar but feature a few differences.
  5. Leverage a web layout that feels familiar and that's learnable. A simple form does that.
  6. Encourage self-reliance. Use affordances that aid find-ability of common elements like documentation and support. Use a breadcrumb to aid way-finding and enable quick access to other pages.
  7. We handed the MVP off to the dev team. Its currently in production.

Contact Me

email kmbutlerx [at] gmail.com

KM Butler Copyright 2013 - 2025

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