The chart below illustrates why I became an advocate for human-centered design. While working on the account features for Amex small business in 2015, I came across a report showing incredibly high call volume from customers requesting a feature that already existed. This pointed to a usability or discoverability issue in our online experience.
ACTUAL DATA: The number of visits to the “Add/Remove Employee Cards” page. As the most requested feature for people calling customer service, the lack of discoverability spiked Amex call volume unnecessarily.
A few months after making the feature more visible on the Account Settings page, I noticed that my solution to prominently place the link towards the top of the page didn't yield desired results (Nov-March). Customers still called in at roughly the same volume, even though visits to the “Add/Remove Cards” page ticked slightly up. I set up qualitative 1:1 research interviews to dig deeper, and I learned that none of our users were able to find the Account Settings page after logging in. It didn’t matter how prominent the link to Add/Remove Cards appeared on the Settings page if customers couldn’t locate it on the Amex website.
The solution to cut call center volume for this feature was then made clear: I made the entry points to Account Settings more obvious upon login, and designed a simpler flow to add and remove company cards. I've been both a practitioner and an advocate of human-centered design ever since.