Problem

Picture yourself as the CEO of a well-known startup company that has been growing exponentially in the recent months.

Unfortunately, your company is outgrowing your fraud management solution and you are using too many fraud prevention vendors to protect your clients and gaps in your solution are being taken advantage of by fraudsters.

Their private information, including their identities and credit card information, is in danger. You are in risk of losing your customers and tens of millions of dollars in revenue and bringing damages to your reputation.

Solution

Based on user metrics of existing solutions in the fraud prevention space, I designed a unified fraud risk evaluation experience for professional to perform risk evaluations with Amazon’s data and expertise.

The main design goal is to unify fraud management and allow them to track different types of fraud within one application.

User Benefits

With high adoption rates, customers who use other existing fraud prevention solutions will be much more content when using this solution, which equate to high customer retention and satisfaction rates.

Business Benefits

The released product aims to be established as one of the core AWS offerings. This will help establish its prominence in the fraud detection and prevention space with continually increasing revenue and market share for AWS as a business.

Released Product

As of July 2020, AWS has released the Fraud Detector to the general public. Much has changed after my efforts during the internship, but I am so glad to see that product I worked on has released!

Part 1: Research🕵️

At the start of the internship, I jumped into this project after its research phase, where much of the research have already been completed. I was provided the research deliverables by my team.

Instead, I digested the existing research documents and reviewed them with stakeholders to learn about the main pain points that bogged down existing fraud prevention solutions in the market, as well as the types of customers who currently use these solutions.

The stakeholders included engineers, product managers, and business intelligence engineers.

I read through the Press Release FAQ (PRFAQ) and Business Requirements Document (BRD) to understand more about my project.

Pain points & design opportunities

Pain points

CRUD (Create, read, update, delete) workflows feel disconnected to one another (i.e. creating and editing variables, rules, etc.)

Graphical user interface (GUI) rule builder is difficult to use, especially for non-programmers

Difficulty navigating through application lifecycle (i.e. moving an app version through different versions for testing purposes)

Design opportunities

Connect the entire fraud prevention experience into one seamless, integrated experience (first-time setup, creating and building variables, rules, etc., testing and promoting applications, and monitoring application performance)

Simplify and improve the usability of the rule builder GUI (select from templates, allow users to access the code any any time, etc.)

Simplify the application lifecycle and show the appropriate information during critical decisions (ex: promoting an app version to live)

Part 2: Ideation💡

With this information I synthesized from the existing research, I sketched out key flows of the experience and presented them to the Product Manager for the project.

At the same time, I created simple wireframes to visualize the flow of the actual experience and reviewed them with my design team.

Part 3: High-fidelity designs ✏️

Following more feedback with the project team and my design team, I moved onto Sketch to create a mid-fidelity / hi-fidelity set of mockups of the key user flows of the service designed using AWS design guidelines.

Below are the some of the flows I can show. All mentions of Amazon and Amazon-related terminology are removed.

Pain point #1 resolved

Old: Difficulty navigating through application lifecycle

New: All four parts of the lifecycle is visible as tabs and the user can easily switch between the tabs to access any version.

Pain point resolved

Old: CRUD workflows feel disconnected to one another

New: CRUD workflows are now streamlined and follow design conventions at Amazon (i.e. wizards).

Pain point resolved

Old: GUI rule builder is difficult to use, especially for non-programmers

New: Rule builder is now more intuitive with a simple layout for all types of user

Prior to these design reviews, I send a copy of my mockups with annotations to everyone present in the meeting. The annotations discussed possible technical constraints, conditional items, and questions I may have for a specific page.

This is to give my stakeholders some time to look over my designs before going into the meeting.

Unfortunately, I was unable to test my designs with external users from other companies. I was told that this was outside of the scope of my internship, but I definitely would have preferred completing some tests myself.

Part 5: Reflection 🧠

Understand context before designing.

This may sound obvious, but it was imperative for me to fully understand my project details before diving deep into design. The context of my project had so many more moving parts that I did not fully comprehend until weeks into my project. Understanding context from multiple perspectives (reading existing project documents, setting up meetings with stakeholders to better understand project details, etc.) made it easier for me to design and made my mockups more focused on solving customers’ pain points.

Set the roadmap of the project for myself.

As I approached the midpoint of my internship, I realized that I needed to determine the flows that I needed to design and ones that were in “Phase Two” of the project before my internship was over.

Given that my project was in multiple phases, I had to set clear expectations to my project manager in terms of the amount of designs and flows that I can create given the limited amount of my work hours. In addition, many of my stakeholders were busy during most of the day, so I had to take full advantage of each meeting and earn their trust throughout the internship.

Always question my design decisions.

After completing this internship, I realized that asking myself "Why does this need to exist?" or "What purpose does this serve?" is a valuable skill to have. Sometimes my design could be instantly improved by removing the unnecessary parts and simplifying the existing design. This made it easier for me to disagree and commit to my design decisions in front of key stakeholders.

User experience applies to all types of products.

No matter what the product is, or the audience of the product is, I must think about users' experience from their perspective. Before I mainly thought of users as everyday consumers, but in the case of AWS, the customers can be highly specialized and technical individuals whom I do not always think of as your typical users. Having empathy for the customer, therefore, was extremely important here.

Special Thanks 🙏

Brendan Lee, Design Product Manager

Tyler Anderson, UX Designer, Mentor

Nick Tostenrude, Internship Project Manager

Idon Shaman, UX Designer

Erin Carlson, Product Marketing Manager