card-research

Although the financial industry is rapidly changing, credit cards are still an undeniably important part of people’s lives. For retailers that have a credit card product, this offering is usually a part of how they build lasting, meaningful relationships with their customers. In Chicago, we focused on our retail Card Partnerships card experiences.

With two major platform redesigns in the pipeline, we thought it’d be a good idea to find out exactly who we were designing for. We set out to learn about the lives of the people who use our products–what is their relationship with money like? How does it factor into their bigger life goals and ambitions?

Competitive Audit 

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We kicked off our work by gathering screenshots of co-workers’, friends’, and family members’ experiences with other online banking tools, to see what other banks were doing when it came to online customer acquisition (application forms) and card servicing platforms (where to manage your account) for partner credit cards. With that, we were able to gain an understanding of common practices and trends currently used in the banking industry, and score them according to standard usability practices. How did we want to be different?

Contextual Inquiries & Co-creation Exercises

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We held in-depth empathy interviews with 18 different cardholders. As part of these conversations, we walked our participants through a series of interactive exercises that enabled us to understand their mental model when it comes to spending and credit. For the final activity, we co-created an ideal credit card servicing experience using sharpies & paper cut-outs.

Synthesis, Persona & Experience Principle Creation

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We took what we’d learned about customer behavior and synthesized it into three behavior types:

• The Financial Novice – For these customers, maintaining control of their finances proved difficult. We set out to help by creating card experiences that were easier to manage than their bank account.

• The Power Shopper – These customers shopped often but frequently forgot about their rewards. We set out to create a way to contextually remind and demonstrate the value of their card's rewards.

• The Financially Cautious – Security was a towering issue for these customers. Communicating in such a way to alleviate their security concerns was of the utmost importance.

We then created experience principles that would work in tandem with our personas to help guide the team when creating new features for Capital One's Partners, using both in the subsequent platform redesigns.